Psychotropic Cinema: Blue Sunshine
Psychotropic Cinema: Blue Sunshine
Directed by Jeff Lieberman, 1977
Imagine if the hallucinogens you experimented with in college triggered physical and personality changes a decade later. This is Blue Sunshine’s premise. The films of the 1970s all share the cultural baggage of the twin cultural events of the decade: the souring of the Utopian promise of the hippie 60s and the souring of the faith in institutions in the wake of Vietnam and the Watergate scandals. This could not help but be reflected in the cinema culture of the time. It accounts for the paranoid conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View, The Conversation, and Marathon Man. The sense of unease and violence, of being adrift, of politics and culture both failing to come to terms with America, is most prevalent in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Writer/director Jeff Lieberman sets his thriller/horror film within this post-Nixon, post-Vietnam context.
It’s 1977, and throughout California strange things are happening to random people. A cop kills his wife & children. A babysitter goes after the children she takes care of. A gathering of old college friends ends with four people dead. Seemingly out of nowhere, otherwise normal adults go berserk, killing anyone nearby, usually loved ones. The only thing that the killers have in common is that they’re all in their late 20s and they lose all their body hair in the days leading up to the attack. When one random attack happens at a party being hosted by a group of twenty-something friends, the survivors, Jerry and his girlfriend Alicia, try to piece together what is happening while the police mistakenly think Jerry is the culprit, so he has to take it on the lam and hide out. Meanwhile, seemingly unrelated, a former college radical named Ed Flemming has realigned himself with the establishment and is running for Congress on a “Vote the Future” platform.
Spoiler alert: Flemming (played by Mark Goddard from “Lost in Space”) is a former LSD cult leader, and his particular “brand” of acid was nicknamed “Blue Sunshine” when he was a student radical at Stanford. It turns out the LSD was a time bomb of insanity with a 10-year alarm, and the alarms are all going off throughout California. Once Jerry figures out the basic idea, there is a climactic chase through a shopping mall, complete with an acid flashback freak out in the mall’s disco (named Big Daddy’s, of course!) while the Congressman is simultaneously holding a rally.
Surprisingly, there aren’t too many films that attempt to come to terms with the dissipation of the counterculture and its evolution into new-age/self-help avenues during the 70s. Blue Sunshine stands out for being aimed at the audience of former hippies, and the film reflects the ambivalence of joining the mainstream, as well as the cultural fear that hallucinogenic experimentation has unknown and permanent consequences. As the former campus radicals lose their hair and then their sanity, there is a real emotion behind the horror of the unknown. The film ends with the ominous postscript that hundreds of doses of “Blue Sunshine” have yet to be accounted for, meaning that the target audience for the film must have been wondering when they were going to lose their hair and go insane.
Blue Sunshine, written and directed by Jeff Lieberman, follows the Hitchcock trope of the wrong man being chased by law enforcement. It has a dash of Reefer Madness, a bit of Halloween, and a Cronenbergian fascination with the body’s changes, filtered through the paranoia so prevalent in American films of the 70s, and mines the uneasiness Pop Culture had with the after-effects of the hippie phenomenon. It shares with Taxi Driver a sense of the past catching up to the present as well as a scene of the protagonist comparing and buying guns, and the subplot of a political race that’s tied into the protagonist’s violence. It’s not a good film, but it is eminently entertaining in a campy way, and part of that is because it is so weird and idiosyncratic. I wish the film had gone further into the gonzo sensibility of its premise, but the flashbacks and bad trips that the victims suffer through are not shown subjectively—there is no trippy montage, no camera trick used to simulate the experience, apart from the climactic disco freakout. This is the terror of the unexpected, the guilt of the self-inflicted. In that sense, the film doesn’t have a psychedelic aesthetic– instead using cultural ambivalence as the framework for a thriller about losing control.
The film’s soundtrack, credited to Charles Gross is mid-70s psychedelia, full of ominous synth soundscapes and echoing phased sound design. But there is a sense of horror in the inexplicable, particularly the acts of violence perpetrated by the victims—one woman goes after young children with a knife while another murders his family and his dog, and a third kills his friends by shoving them into a roaring fireplace. The acting is all over the place, and the casting is surprising. The lead role of Jerry is played by Zalman King (better known for his softcore films of the 80s), who alternates between chewing-the-scenery freakouts and a kind of comatose acceptance. The first victim of the Blue Sunshine, and the one whose crimes Jerry is mistakenly wanted for is played by Richard Crystal—Billy’s brother! And the disco freakout happens to Flemming’s campaign manager, played by character actor Ray Young, best known for the lead role in The Krofft Supershow’s “Bigfoot & Wildboy”. There are many singular touches, such as a subplot (given a surprising amount of screen time) involving Flemming’s campaign hiring a puppet show to appear at his rally with Streisand and Sinatra puppets that sing parodies of their signature songs, which the camera lingers on for several minutes. Then there’s the discotheque freakout, which has become a meme shared via social media. Made on a low budget, the film is fascinating and it’s a shame that it isn’t better known.
Blue Sunshine is available to stream on Shudder. It’s also available on a special DVD from Shout Factory as part of “Elvira’s Movie Macabre” set with an introduction by the busty comedienne and random comments inserted into the film’s run, ostensibly to announce the commercial breaks when it was broadcast. Additionally, it is available on a beautifully remastered Blu-Ray/4K UHD box set from Synapse Films.
Check out our first edition of Psychotropic Cinema: Altered States!
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