As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, my movie tastes are nothing if not varied and non-conformist, as demonstrated yet again last night, when I watched the DVD of a decidedly macabre and thoroughly trippy but nowadays not widely-known cult sci fi/horror movie entitled Blue Sunshine.
Written and directed by Jeff Lieberman released by Cinema Shares International in 1978, Blue Sunshine stars a young Sean Penn-lookalike Zalman King as Jerry Zipkin, a maverick character who finds himself on the run as the prime suspect for a murder that he didn't commit but which proves to be just one strand in a singularly complex, much-tangled, but hitherto long-hidden conspiracy.
Set in 1977 Los Angeles, Blue Sunshine opens at a party one evening where Jerry and several longstanding friends are in attendance. The centre of attention is a popular dark-haired extrovert photographer named Frannie Scott (Ricky Crystal – fellow actor Billy's brother), who starts singing the classic Frank Sinatra song 'Just In Time', and while doing so playfully interacts with the girlfriend of another friend there, Joe (Steve Tannen aka Tannes).
This incites a scuffle between the two men, with Joe grasping Frannie's hair – only to be thoroughly shocked when it all comes off in his hand. Frannie's famous black hair is a wig, underneath which Frannie is revealed to be almost entirely bald, just a few strands of his real black hair remaining on his scalp. Frannie flees, his facial expression both glazed and crazed, so Joe and some other friends go after him in a car, but Jerry stays behind to check out the woodlands surrounding the house in case he's hiding there instead, and three of the female party goers (including Joe's girlfriend) remain inside the house, frightened and disturbed by the bizarre events that have just taken place.
When one of them hears someone at the door, she opens it, assuming that the others have returned from their search, but instead a psychotic Frannie bursts in and murders all three of the women, pushing their bodies onto the log fire. Jerry hears their screams and races back to the house, where he confronts Frannie. A furious fight ensues between the two men, spilling out onto the road where Frannie falls directly into the path of a lorry driving by, containing two men, and is killed almost instantly by the collision. Jerry runs away but is shot in the arm by one of the lorry drivers before successfully making his escape in a car.
The next day, in need of support, Jerry meets up with Alicia (Deborah Winters), one of the friends who'd been at the party with him and knows what happened with Frannie. While sitting talking to her, he happens to notice the headlines of a newspaper being read by a nearby stranger, which tell of how a bald police detective named John O'Malley (Bill Cameron) had seemingly lost his mind, having just murdered his entire family as well as a neighbour before turning the gun on himself. Could two recent killings by two apparently separate but bald frenzied psychotics be more than just a coincidence?
More random senseless killings and attempted killings soon follow, and in each case committed by someone who has lost all of their hair – but that is not the only connection. With information provided by his surgeon buddy Davey Blume (Robert Walden), Jerry discovers that all of the killers and would-be killers, now themselves all dead as a result of suicide or accidental death following their actions, had attended California's Stanford University ten years ago, and all of them had purchased a mysterious but very potent new form of LSD called Blue Sunshine from a fellow student named Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard) – the very same Ed Flemming who subsequently reinvented himself as a highly-respected local politician and is now standing for election to Congress. Moreover, one of the now-deceased attempted killers was none other than Flemming's divorced wife, Wendy (Ann Cooper).
Naturally keen not to be associated with any possible scandals, Flemming is not at all happy when Jerry turns up asking questions about Blue Sunshine, all knowledge of which he denies. He is supported by another ex-Stanford student from that same period ten years ago, a veritable man-mountain named Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young), now serving as Flemming's campaign manager, who vows to keep Jerry very much in his sights – and Alicia too, as he is greatly attracted to her.
Meanwhile, Jerry is horrified to learn that Davey, who was yet another Stanford student a decade ago, is losing his hair. However, Davey assures him that although he had indeed purchased packets of Blue Sunshine from Flemming when they were at Stanford together, he'd simply sold them on, in order to help pay his college fees, but he had never taken any of it himself.
Davey speculates to Jerry that Blue Sunshine may cause its long-delayed but deadly effects, i.e. uncontrollable homicidal behaviour seemingly triggered by stress and loud noises, as well as extreme alopecia (hair loss), by extensively damaging its user's chromosomes, but that anyone suspected of having been a regular Blue Sunshine user would have to be incapacitated alive and a blood sample taken in order for this hypothesis to be put to the test. So Jerry goes off to purchase a gun capable of firing darts containing a strong tranquiliser surreptitiously supplied to him by Davey, and attends a political rally for Flemming, held in a local shopping mall.
This is just as well, because while there, Detective Clay (Charles Siebert), the cop who has been tenaciously albeit mistakenly chasing after Jerry as the culprit behind Frannie's death, enters into an altercation with Mulligan, during which Mulligan's hair falls off. Yes indeed, he's bald too, yet another former Blue Sunshine user, and just as homicidal as all of the others, his latent psychosis having been triggered by the loud disco music being pumped out of the speakers at the rally.
Mulligan sets out on a berserk blitzkrieg of rampaging destruction, with terrified rally attendees scattering in all direction. Only one thing stands between him and wholesale slaughter – a quaking Jerry wielding a loaded tranquiliser gun. But will Jerry succeed in felling the ogre that Mulligan has become, courtesy of Blue Sunshine? Let's just say that there is a memorable twist right at the very end of the movie, a highly disturbing epilogue, but you'll have to watch the movie for yourself to find out what it is.
Zalman King's portrayal of Jerry is just a little too quirky for my liking, his mannerisms veering on occasion toward manic over-acting, and which combined with his not dissimilar facial features remind me of a young Mork-era Robin Williams. Equally, the expressions upon the faces of the erstwhile Blue Sunshine users look positively alienesque, as if they have just stepped out of another dimension. Nevertheless, this quintessentially 70s movie boasts a highly engrossing, entertaining, novel storyline, an odd yet effective amalgamation of dark thriller, creepy horror, and medically-themed science fiction paranoia in punchy profusion.
And although it took me much of its 94-min running time to work out where I'd seen him before, I finally recognized the Ed Flemming actor, Mark Goddard, as having previously been none other than Major Don West in the late 1960s sci fi TV show Lost In Space that I used to watch avidly as a child.
If you'd like to sample Blue Sunshine for yourself (the movie, not the drug!), be sure to click here and here to view on YouTube a couple of official trailers for it – the first of which in particular, as you'll soon discover, never misses an opportunity to remind you that the movie's title is… Blue Sunshine!
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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