Retro Raunch Revisit

BLUE SUNSHINE (1977)
Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Robert Walden, Charles Siebert, Mark Goddard, Ray Young, Ann Cooper, Alice Ghostley
Directed by Jeff Lieberman
Released December 2, 1977 (Happy 45th Anniversary)
What do a doctor speaking to his cancer patient (A), a housewife complaining about her hubby to a next door neighbor (B), and a woman babysitting for her friend (C) all have in common? The trio all lead us to Jerry Zipkin (who looks like a young & scruffier cross between René Auberjonois and Sean Penn, and keeps his hands in his pockets a lot). Jerry is at a Los Angeles party in a cabin where he sees a guest (Brion James) suddenly burst into a Rodan impersonation, flapping & squawking his arms. Then an old friend, Frannie (played by Billy Crystal's brother, Richard) descends from stairs crooning ala Frtank 'Ol' Blue Eyes' Sinatra. After his song, Frannie gets his wig yanked off for putting the moves on another man's woman, causing him to flee into the woods. With everyone out looking for him, he returns to the cabin, kills 3 women, and stuffs their bodies into a huge fireplace. Jerry confronts Frannie and fights him, and as both men spill outside onto a road, Frannie is fatally pushed into the path of an oncoming truck. With Jerry responsible for this death, and shot in the right arm by the vehicle's passenger, he is now wrongly accused of the party murders and goes on the run, first seeking medical help from an old friend he's tracked down, Dr. David Blume (from A). Jerry's feisty girlfriend, Alicia, also attempts to help him clear his name while pouring back cocktails. Stressed & frustrated, he discovers that 10yrs earlier in 1967, Frannie was amongst a group of Stanford University kids who had been given a bad batch of LSD ('blue sunshine') which caused the users to get shredding headaches, lose their hair, and the most alarming negative side effect: has turned them homicidal exactly a full decade after first taking the drug -- with the condition irreversible.

The drug dealer back then was Ed Flemming, who is now a Neo-Con politician running for Congress. When Jerry reads of a John O' Malley (from B), an ex-detective having slaughtered his family, he breaks into the man's house to sift through the crime scene where he suffers a psychedelic panic attack with a frightening premonition. Jerry and Alicia meet Flemming at his campaign headquarters, along with his bodyguard named Wayne Mulligan who was a former football player. Hoping Flemming will give him answers about the drug, Jerry comes up empty knowing Flemming is hiding something. Still a fugitive eluding the police (primarily Lt. Clay), Jerry returns to Dr. Blume and finds out that Doc knew Flemming from their school campus flower power days, having sold drugs for him as classmates were "turning on, tuning in, and dropping out." He asks for tranquilizers but leaves without any. Meanwhile, Mulligan hits on Alicia who is taken aback when he yells at a blaring truck that zooms by. Hesitant, she nonetheless agrees to meet him at a shopping mall discotheque. When Jerry visits Wendy Flemming (the would-be Congressman's wife from C) for more info about blue sunshine, she boots him from her apartment but unsettled, he comes back just as she goes bonkers, chasing 2 children in her care (who are shouting for Dr. Pepper!) with a butcher knife. Defending himself, he tosses her over a balcony. After Lt. Clay pays Flemming a visit enquiring about his wife's death and Jerry's involvement, Jerry is in a park frequented by junkies. At first spooked by a bald man (who is either gay cruising, another cue ball on the path to flipping out, or just an average weirdo), he sees Dr. Blume who hands over some tranquilizers.

As Alicia contacts Lt. Clay in preparation to apprehend Mulligan (to test him for blue sunshine), Jerry buys a tranq gun. When Alicia meets Mulligan at the disco, he is agitated by noise and excuses himself to the bathroom. Outside, Jerry sets up the tranq gun and Lt. Clay arrives to meet Alicia inside. Told that Mulligan is in the bathroom, Lt. Clay goes to fetch him but is promptly attacked and knocked out after Mulligan pulls off a wig. Mulligan returns looking like an angry Mr. Clean and goes spectacularly apeshit and trashes the place in berserk Hulk mode. As Flemming is giving a rally in the same mall (complete with lip-synching marionettes of Barbara Streisand and Frank Sinatra!), Jerry keeps an eye on him (as his campaign already has cover-up implications which will be worse should the crooked candidate wind up in Washington), but Flemming's speech is broken up by screaming patrons running past in terror from the disco. Flemming tries to take down Jerry but is shaken off as Jerry heads to the disco. He hits the dancefloor and grapples with Mulligan but quick-thinking Alicia cranks up the genre's terrible tunes knowing the loud music will drive Mulligan away. As Jerry chases Mulligan through the mall, will he be able to take down the linebacker with the tranq gun? Will he pick up some Xmas cards & wrapping paper as he passes through the gift shop? Did he hear Flemming's political ads playing on the TVs announce how "it's time to make America good again?"

Are there more individuals out there still to pop up as menacing, slightly zombie-ish, wacko chrome dome killers? BLUE SUNSHINE is an obscure & off kilter, socio-political fringe thriller that is delirious but entertaining with it's interesting premise that recalls early David Cronenberg without the graphic grossness. Far from innocent & harmless substance abuse, and the odd 'bad trip' from a couple of tabs, the idea of involving former graduates having indulged in past "experimentation" who are now respectable "establishment" who suffer mad shark-eye stares, psychotic breaks and lash out in raging rampage, makes for a great plot and seems to even carry a vague, elitist anti-hippie sentiment. The movie does have pacing problems which along the lines of suspenseful made-for-TV fare, has some bland characters, overacting making for unintentionally funny, and the tension sometimes deflating into flatness, but if nothing else, it has originality going for it (regardless of twitchy Jerry flirting between silently subdued, erratic, immature, and ridiculously temperamental to the hilt) and offers a lot of guess work as to who might be a potential kook. Also of note is how the movie is a real product of the 1970's. The backdrop of that decade saw a penchant for cynicism and mistrust with unnerving films of the post-Vietnam & Watergate era delving into paranoia, conspiracies, and infection/invasion themes (all with resident car chases).

Here, the uinque twist comes from the subliminalism of revolutionary counterculture values having turned into the horror of mass conformist, corporate/capitalist collaboration. [It's also probably no accident/coincidence that the narcotic nightmare of 'blue sunshine' ominously echoes the CIA'S notorious 'Project MKUltra' mind control program from 1953-73 that conducted secret experiments with psychotropic drugs on human test subjects in colleges & universities, prisons, and hospitals -- with the institutions each serving as fronts. Often unwilling citizens (Americans and Canadians) went haywire from mindbending trances & flashbacks, and the purpose of manipulating brain function was tantamount to torture. The most extreme accusations contend the CIA using MKUltra to create assassins, triggered from brainwashing. 20yrs of controversial revelations and damning documents led to Senate Hearings in August 1977]. BLUE SUNSHINE's discordant and eerie musical score adds to a creep factor, and with a firm cult status and crossover appeal, the movie was often seen projected behind many bands playing on stage at CBGB's during its early punk years, and UK group The Glove (The Cure's Robert Smith and Siouxsie and the Banshees' Steven Severin) were such huge fans of the film that they named their album after it. Overall, this movie is a neglected off the wall rarity that in addition to defying singular categorization, no matter how it's labeled (a more psychological cousin of THE 39 STEPS without the dementia from electric Kool-Aid?), still fits perfectly beside your copy of REEFER MADNESS.