Blue Sunshine (1977)

Jeff Lieberman sometimes feels like a poor man’s Larry Cohen, a quirky independent film-maker with big ideas whose films are never quite as focused as they should be. After the revenge of nature thriller Squirm (1976) he made this wild and crazy lament for the lost idealism of the late 1960s which, like a lot of his work, is full of great ideas but a bit too scattershot to really be effective.

A cautionary tale about drug misuse, Blue Sunshine is set in 1977, a decade after Stanford University students dabbled with an experimental batch of LSD known as Blue Sunshine created by Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard). Ten years on, Flemming is running for political office and his former clients are only now beginning to feel the long term effects of Blue Sunshine – chromosomal damage causes their hair to fall out before they become psychotic killers. Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) is wrongly accused of one of the killings and goes on the run, aided by his girlfriend Alicia Sweeney (Deborah Winters). He uncovers the link between Flemming and Blue Sunshine and tries to track down his former clients before they too succumb to the drug’s long-term effects.

Blue Sunshine feels like the despairing look over the shoulder of a 60s counter culture would-be revolutionary dismayed at the way things turned out. A decade on, the idealistic long hairs of the Summer of Love have become suburban divorcees, doctors, cops and worst of all politicians. The film is the celluloid embodiment of the bad trip that was the 1970s after the 60s dream died at Cielo Drive, Altamont and Kent State (“Nothing affected me more than when The Beatles broke up,” laments one character. “My divorce was nothing compared to that.”) It’s a film as crazy as its characters and plays bit like the work of David Cronenberg’s not quite so organised, less intellectually rigorous but even wilder younger brother. Whatever else you think of it, it’s certainly unique.

Where else would you find a film about old hippies suffering their worst nightmare (the loss of their hair) and in which the hero gets a vital clue from… a taling parrot! Nothing else that Lieberman did was quite as deranged as Blue Sunshine and if at time it’s unfocused and the satire isn’t as sharp as it would be in a Cronenberg or Ronero film then you have to admire its wild ambition and endless inventiveness. Although it gets lost a bit from time to time, with an necessary car chase and the
obligatory 1977 disco scene – the sound of the Disco Blue by The Humane Society for the Preservation of Good Music drives one old hippy over the edge – there are some genuinely impressive moments here – the surgery scene (Zipkin suspects that his old friend and lead surgeon Doctor David Blume (Robert Walden) had used Blue Sunshine) is very tense and the psycho scene where the suddenly hairless babysitter menaces her young wards is deeply unsettling.

Less successful is the lead performance from Zalman King who is, frankly, hopeless. Zipkin often seems crazier than the killers – he’s on the edge the whole time – and King seems to have only two acting settings: virtually comatose and full throttle insanity. He drifts around the story being quite ineffective, any gains Zipkin makes being almost entirely accidental. Ironically, Zipkin is only one of his peer group who hasn’t gone straight. He remains an outsider, a nonconformist even as the rest of his generation “sell out.” It’s a shame that King, who later became a director of softcore erotica (Two Moon Junction (1988), Wild Orchid (1990), Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue (1991)), created the saucy TV series The Red Shoe Diaries (1992-1997) and co-wrote and co-produced 9½ Weeks (1986), couldn’t bring any nuance to the role. He often feels like he’s been simply let loose by Lieberman, told to do what he wanted and his performance suffers as a result.

The rest of the cast are fine, including Deborah Winters as Zipkin’s long suffering girlfriend, Richard Crystal – Billy’s brother – as the first Blue Sunshine casualty, Robert Walden from TV series Lou Grant (1977-1982) and Mark Goddard – the former Major Don West from Lost in Space (1965-1968) – as the aspiring politician Ed Flemming who comes complete with a prescient Trumpian campaign slogan (“time to make America good again”). There’s also a small role for Brion James (Leon in Blade Runner (1982)) as a man at a party doing an impression of Rodan (“the painter?” “No the monster”).

It ends with a caption telling us that “two hundred and fifty-five doses of Blue Sunshine manufactured in September 1967 are still unaccounted for,” a joke too far perhaps in a film full of very funny lines (“there’s a bald man in there and he’s going batshit!”) and situations. Look closely at the newspaper being read (at a rather strange angle so we better see the page) by a man on a park bench and you’ll see cinema ads for The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Network (1976).. and a double bill of Squirm and Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974) under its Tender Flesh title!

Though the film was long out of circulation, those who saw Blue Sunshine at the time were certainly impressed by it. Among those early fans were musicians Robert Smith from The Cure and Steve Severin from Siouxsie and the Banshees. When they formed new band The Glove in 1983 their only album was titled Blue Sunshine after the film. Severin later wrote that between recording sessions they pair would unwind by watching “video nasties. Dario Argento in particular.”

Blue Sunshine is a scrappy film but a very funny and often very clever one. It suffers enormously from King’s haphazard performance but benefits from its ridiculous premise and the fact that the rest of the cast play it completely straight. Lieberman followed it with the television film Doctor Franken (1980) and the backwoods slasher Just Before Dawn (1981) before his career slowed down. After 1994’s television film Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion it took him almost a decade to get his next film, Satan’s Little Helper (2004), off the ground and he sadly hasn’t been heard from since.