Blue Sunshine

1970s horror had its vampires and zombies and Giallo carve-ups, but also a few new filmmakers with real imagination. David Cronenberg plumbed new depths of  body horror, while John Carpenter relocated horror to the universally identifiable setting of a  middle-class neighborhood.

Advertising filmmaker Jeff Lieberman had a good experience with his first horror opus  Squirm, a basic item exploiting the fear of slimy things that creep in the dark. The whole show rested on makeup artist Rick Baker’s illusions of worms burrowing into human flesh.

The producers asked for an immediate follow-up, for which Lieberman brought forth one of the most original horror ideas of the decade. Various governmental authorities of the 1960s generated public relations media that demonized all recreational drugs. Gross exaggeration of negative effects made even marijuana seem like a death sentence. Ten years later, the generation that took LSD had now become part of the Establishment. What if a certain kind of LSD suddenly exhibited time-delayed negative effects?

Squirm had been a smart commercial gambit, but Blue Sunshine can boast a brilliant premise — one with which tens of thousands of former LSD trippers could immediately relate. Lieberman’s film is far from perfect, but his filmmaker peers in horror-fantasy gave it high marks.

Under a full moon, several unrelated people are experiencing disagreeable phenomena. Surgeon David Blume (Robert Walden) is run-down, and so irritable that he’s having trouble concentrating on his duties. Babysitter Wendy Flemming (Ann Cooper) becomes distressed when her hair begins falling out in clumps. Mrs. O’Malley (Adriana Shaw) feels terrorized by her detective husband (Bill Cameron), whose angry, resentful behavior is becoming more extreme. At a getaway party at a mountain cabin, nice-guy Frannie Scott (Richard Crystal) suddenly goes berserk. His hair falls out in one go, leaving him bald. A few minutes later, he murders three women. The crime scene inadvertently makes his friend Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) look like the guilty party.

With the help of his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters) Jerry avoids the police and tries to establish his innocence. With similar incidents of maniacal killings showing up in the news, Alicia hits on a rational explanation. All the deranged killers were students at Stanford ten years ago, and all bought tabs of LSD called ‘Blue Sunshine’ from Edward Flemming (Mark Goddard of TV’s Lost in Space), who is now running for congress. Jerry manages to track down Wendy, who is also slipping into madness — their encounter only compounds the tragedy. Candidate Flemming can’t afford for his student days as a drug dealer to reach the press. His campaign manager Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young) aggressively hits on Alicia … who discovers that Wayne was himself a heavy user of Blue Sunshine.

Blue Sunshine must have been rated R for disturbing ideas, because it’s not a very gory movie … the first reel has a grotesque triple slaying, but it happens mostly off-screen. The chromosomal damage of Blue Sunshine doesn’t result in  impossible mutations or  nasty new organs. Instead, these healthy young people experience a time-delay mental derangement and loss of hair. Losing one’s hair is a nearly universal dream experience, easily related to a fear of aging and death. The mental changes vary — some victims just get headaches and others become irritable, but the final stage sees them transformed into homicidal maniacs, even the sweet babysitter Wendy. The maniacs end up with dilated pupils and frozen faces of rage. The film’s most familiar ad image is of a totally bald Ann Cooper, her expression rigid — brandishing a wicked carving knife.

“I told you so!” — what if Sgt. Joe Friday’s anti-drug tirades were accurate? 

‘Back in the day,’ drug overdoses were Here and Now tragedies — a notable cause of mortality among upscale and middle-class kids. Many people played with unknown substances, making Death by Overdose a common early exit, especially for students in high school and college. You put something in your body, who the hell know what the result will be?  But society took drug use as a taboo issue, to be shunned rather than fully investigated … marijuana is legal now, but without scientific studies of its full effects.  Making things worse, government anti-drug propaganda was often too absurd to be believed, feeding the belief that everything the Establishment said was a lie.  Without any substantiation, one anti-drug scare film showed pictures of hideously deformed babies, falsely claiming that they were the result of LSD use.

Jeff Lieberman’s screenplay is somewhat slack as a suspense thriller, but it scores big on the issue of drugs coming back to haunt their users. His direction is assured throughout. Instead of going straight for cynical irony, as might  Larry Cohen, Lieberman expresses genuine concern for his characters. None of the transformed maniacs are bad people, even if Frannie explodes in rage at his friends, and Wendy threatens the children she’s babysitting with a knife. Even Ray Young’s pushy Wayne Mulligan is sympathetic — the former football star sweats like a hog, and seems to intuit that he’s going crazy. Because the storyline involves a political candidate, we’re reminded somewhat of David Cronenberg’s later film  The Dead Zone. Stephen King’s source book didn’t appear until 1979.

Lieberman delivers more natural performances than we see in David Cronenberg’s first films. He has a big cast to work with, and most do well; he covers difficulties with his child actors with dubbing and quick cutaways. Mark Goddard, Deborah Winters and Ann Cooper are perfectly cast to type. Goddard’s Ed Flemming isn’t an ‘evil’ political candidate, like the one played by Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone. But his squeaky-clean image is nicely undercut by Frannie’s old photo of him as an LSD drug guru. Surely some ’70s climbers did their best to downplay older reputations as Acid Heads.

A slight inconsistency?  The deranged detective O’Malley has apparently lost his hair and wears a wig, but the other victim / maniacs lose their hair ‘all at once.’ When yanked off in one fell swoop, the natural hair stays intact, like a wig, or a scalp taken in a western.

→  Actor Robert Walden had just made a terrific impression in  All the President’s Men; his young surgeon is the film’s best performance. The leading man Zalman King performs decently but lacks the kind of charisma to put us on his side, to makes us care what happens to him. He’s more interesting than Stephen Lack in Cronenberg’s  Scanners, but we found ourselves wishing that Robert Walden had been given the lead role. (The photo of Robert Walden is from a TV show)

Bits from Argentina Brunetti, Adriana Shaw and Alice Ghostley (yes!) contribute to the film’s human face. The very distinctive Brion James ( Blade Runner) has a bit as another possible Stanford graduate experiencing a Blue Sunshine flashback. While waiting in a park, Jerry encounters a bald man with such a creepy look, we wonder if the film will become ‘Invasion of the Blue Sunshine People’.

(Spoiler)  It’s odd that Robert Walden’s Dr. Blume is not revealed to be another Blue Sunshine user, a ticking mental time bomb. We certainly expect him to be — he’s in miserable shape and becomes very irritable right in the middle of a surgical procedure. Dr. Blume pops pills to keep going — as did his intern six years earlier in Paddy Chayefsky’s  The Hospital. To our surprise the movie reveals that Blume is okay, that he never dropped Blue Sunshine.

The police pursuit of Jerry Zipkin never really finds traction, and the actions of the one detective on the case don’t amount to much. Nobody likes the film’s abrupt ending, which counterpoints a tepid political rally with a melee in a Disco club. We listened to big parts of Lieberman’s audio commentaries and interviews, and have probably missed the full story on this.  (Spoiler)  At the fade-out, Jerry Zipkin is just getting a handle on evidence of the Blue Sunshine Syndrome. The problem is that our concern was for everybody, not just Jerry. We don’t see Alicia’s loyalty rewarded, or find out how the truth affects the congressional candidate Flemming, etc. And did David Blume really never drop acid, or is he lying to keep some medical committee from revoking his surgical status?  Honestly, when he was freaking out during that operation, one would think he had to have been a Blue Sunshine user.