Blue Sunshine (1977)

Jeff Lieberman's second directorial effort is every bit as offbeat, quirky and uncategorisable as his first, Squirm (1976).  While the earlier film might nominally be an eco-horror film, (with a sub-text of sexual violence and the reactionary and repressive societal norms of isolated rural communities), Blue Sunshine (1977) is far less easily categorised.  Perhaps its closest equivalents, though, are Cronenberg's Rabid and Shivers, sharing their depictions of eruptions of brutality against an otherwise unremarkable urban backdrop and protagonists transformed from ordinary citizens into violent monsters as a result of their bodies being infected.  But where Cronenberg's films featured literal infections by viruses and parasites, Blue Sunshine focuses upon chemical infection by the eponymous LSD variant, which, after a ten year delay, wreaks both physical and mental transformations upon those who had taken it.  The ultimate in bad trips, in fact.  On the face of it, this would seem to make the film some kind of reactionary cautionary tale about the perils of drugs:'See, those damn liberal hippies and their LSD really were a bunch of degenerates who will destroy society!'  Except that it isn't that simple, with the film gradually revealing that both those who had taken the drugs and those who had peddled them are actually all respectable middle class professionals, many occupying positions of authority.

The weirdness of the events that unfold in Blue Sunshine are emphasised by Lieberman's use of highly conventional narrative structures.  The plot, for instance, unfolds in the form of an investigation by a hero constantly being blamed by the authorities for the killings being committed by the 'Blue Sunshine' victims, forcing him to be a fugitive - a classic noir motif.  From the outset he is on the run, with the film opening with a college reunion at cabin in the woods - during some horseplay it is revealed that one of the participants is bald, when his wig is inadvertently pulled off.  He runs off into the woods, but when some of the others go to look for him, he returns and brutally murders those still at the cabin, before attacking the returning searchers, before running off again.  The hero, Jerry Zipkin, finds himself chased through the woods by his homicidal friend, reaching a road where the maniac is hit and killed by a truck.  Zipkin finds himself blamed both for this death and the murders at the cabin, evading the police to get to the city, where he tries to figure out what turned his friend into a bald, violent maniac.  

In the course of his investigation, he finds that his friend's experience wasn't unique - a police officer suffering severe hair loss, for example, had recently suddenly gone berserk and murdered his family.  In a sub-plot, a divorced mother of two young children finds herself suffering hair loss and feelings of aggression, while he estranged husband campaigns for a seat in Congress.  Eventually, Zipkin finds that the common denominator between those affected is that they were all at college together ten years earlier and had taken the LSD variant 'Blue Sunshine' - except the ex-husband, who was the one selling the drug.  Something he, of course, denies and  - Zipkin facing murder charges - is confident won't come out.  Unfortunately, however, his own campaign manager/bodyguard was himself one of the politician's best customers back in college.  This very conventional investigatory plot is punctuated by outbursts of bizarre violence, producing some striking and highly memorable images of bald headed lunatics wielding knives or breaking up shopping centres.   The bodyguard's climactic rampage through a disco, overspilling into a shopping mall, ('There's a bald maniac in there and he's going apeshit!'), though can't quite top the sight of the politician's ex-wife suddenly pull off her wig and menace her children with a large kitchen knife for disturbing bizareness.

It is, of course, significant, that much of the violence takes place against backdrops symbolic of seventies consumerism - a shopping mall, a disco, the ex-wife's neat apartment of the type seen in commercials for lifestyle products - as the story is, in essence, about the subversion of sixties ideals by naked capitalism, in the form of the drug dealing future congressman.  The quest for profit and material gain, rather than fee love hippies or even hallucinogenic drugs themselves, lies at the root of all the mayhem that unfolds in Blue Sunshine.  Lieberman's direction plays fast and loose with audience expectations, the backwoods opening suggesting some kind of rural slasher scenario, which ends abruptly when the killer goes under the wheels of a truck, with the action switching instead to sunlit urban California - all concrete malls and modernist buildings as it turns into more of a suspense drama, as we wait to see who is going to go bald and crazy next.  Unfortunately, the change in scenario also results in a slowing of the film's pace, which Lieberman never quite manages to speed up again.  Some quirky casting, including Zalman King, before he turned director of erotica, as Zipkin and Lost in Space's Mark Goddard as the politician, his secret shadiness contrasting radically with his image as upright space pilot Major West in the Irwin Allen series, helps things along.  In turns bewildering, bizarre and unsettling, Blue Sunshine's main fault is that, ultimately, it doesn't really know where to go with its central idea, resulting in a somewhat underwhelming conclusion.  Probably best seen as a satirical black comedy rather than a pure horror or science fiction film, it does, however, boast an original concept, setting it apart from the usual zombies, slashers and out-of-control wild animals that seemed to be increasingly dominating those genres in the seventies.