There’s something charming about the way that Blue Sunshine features several pans up to a full moon between snippets of action in the lead up to and following the title reveal. Every time you think “Surely I’ve seen the last of these goofy ass moon pan shots,” as we cut to a domestic scene in a kitchen, but then, nope, here comes another one. This film, like The Parallax View, was programmed for my local arthouse theater’s “The Paranoid Style in American Cinema” signature program, but unlike that film (or Lumet’s Network, which is coming up later in the month), this one treads into slightly campier territory. Weirdly, it seems to blend elements from movies that actually came after it, with the paranoid, on-the-run everyman at the center of events in which people lose control of themselves seeming to presage the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the way that past casual drug experimentation comes back to haunt people years after their college days reminded me quite a bit of Firestarter, the original novel version of which wouldn’t be published until 1980. Even the mall setting of the finale seemed to presciently “borrow” from Dawn of the Dead. 

Blue Sunshine opens at a party, where a group of friends gather around one of their friends, Frannie, as he does a bit of a crooner act. As part of the bit, he pretends to kiss one of the ladies present, and in their playful tussle, his hair is revealed to be a wig when it comes off in her hands. He has a psychotic break and flees into the woods. While a few of the partygoers go into town to see if Frannie found his way there, Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) remains behind to search the woods, sending his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters) into town with the others so that she can get a calmative for her nausea. Searching the woods, Zipkin hears the other women who were left behind at the house scream, and rushes in to discover that Frannie has returned and murdered them, throwing their bodies into a fireplace. Frannie reappears and the two struggle, making their way to the road as Zipkin tries to flee, finally pushing the seemingly superhuman Frannie into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck’s occupants, thinking that Zipkin has murdered an innocent man, attempt to apprehend him and even manage to shoot him in the arm. Back at the location of the party, the police have put all the pieces together and come to the conclusion that Zipkin is a murderer. 

I’m going to skip ahead a little to the conspiracy here, because the film takes its sweet time getting to it. Frannie is not alone in his condition; all over the city, there are people losing their hair completely and then flying into psychotic, murderous rages. As it turns out, this is all owing to a particular batch of LSD, the titular Blue Sunshine, that all of the affected people tried ten years previously when they were all at Stanford. Zipkin, on the run and trying to prove his innocence, is forced to put this together, and it’s in this that the film really tips its hand vis-a-vis how unbaked an idea this is. Unlike Beatty’s reporter character in The Parallax View, Zipkin doesn’t seem particularly well suited for investigation, and comes to some of his conclusions with all the logic of a quick wrap-up at the end of an episode of Adam West’s Batman. He’s bumbling and sweaty, and King is very, very earnest in the role. And unlike other movies in which an innocent bystander is targeted because they photographed (Blow Up, Cat o’ Nine Tails), recorded (Blow Out, The Conversation), overheard, or otherwise became aware of something that someone wants to cover up, our hero isn’t fleeing the conspiracy or the killer, but the police. 

You’d think that this would put an interesting spin on it, but what it means is that the conspiracy proper happens so far outside of the context of Zipkin’s story that the fact that the man behind the coverup is an up-and-coming politician is completely ancillary to the narrative. It doesn’t contribute anything to the film, and instead seems to have been included solely to cash in on the production decade’s general antipathy toward governmental figures in the national psychological wake of Watergate. That questioning of authority seems to run counterintuitive to the film’s Reefer Madness-like propaganda about the dangers of taking LSD in college, and long-time fears from self-appointed moral guardians that dropping acid would have severe deleterious effects in the long term (in this case, turning people into homicidal maniacs with instantaneous alopecia). That tonal whiplash is present throughout this thing, which is the exact kind of camp that ends up turning a movie like this into a cult classic. For instance, one of the opening scenes we see involves a woman confiding in her neighbor that her husband has been behaving strangely lately and losing his hair, and in the course of the scene there are a few fun character moments that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Waters film, as she screams at her son to stop eating chocolate pudding while her other son parades around the room with a parrot on his shoulder that’s nearly half his size. The next time we’re in that same location, Zipkin is rummaging through the house after reading about the family’s slaying in the newspaper and connecting some of the details to what happened with Frannie, and the soundtrack is filled with the family’s dying screams as Zipkin stumbles upon child-sized body outlines on the floor, complete with bloodstains of horrific proportions; it’s like something out of the early scenes of Manhunter, and it’s truly gruesome stuff. But then the next scene is a goofy bit where Zipkin Bat-deduces that he can get some information out of Senator Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard), or a scene wherein Flemming’s ex-wife (Ann Cooper) suddenly snaps and starts to attack the children that she’s babysitting with a knife, but the kids clearly find the bald cap on the actress hilarious, so they’re laughing as they recite their “frightened child” dialogue. 

Granted, I would say that there aren’t any scenes of shocking violence so much as shocking images of the aftermath of violence, like the murder scene noted above. For the most part, the scenes in which the acid-activated killers feature them going about their sprees with very little energy, falling somewhere between Romero’s zombies and Karloff’s Creature on the scale of vitality. I have to wonder if this was, in part, a utilitarian choice; bald prosthetic technology wasn’t exactly at its peak in the mid-seventies, and there are many shots in the film in which the plasticky material the bald caps are composed of visibly wrinkles in ways that flesh does not. Further, the killers’ eyes also all turn black when their sprees begin, and the contacts used for the effect might have made it difficult to navigate the soundstage. When the former Mrs. Fleming is brandishing a prop knife at the not-actually-scared children in her apartment, she’s certainly moving with a sluggishness that suggests she’s just repeating a (barely) choreographed motion, and the fact that her gaze is focused directly in front of her (as opposed to down at the children) seems to indicate she also couldn’t see for shit. The only maniac that’s truly scary is the first one, Frannie, since he manages to get in a couple of good jump scares and his attack on the three partying women is the most shocking since it’s the first act of violence that we see. The showdown at the end between Zipkin and Flemming’s security man Mulligan—whom we are repeatedly reminded is a former football player—is delightful to watch, but Mulligan is so lumbering and slow that there’s never any real sense of danger. Normally, the tension that we get in a paranoid thriller like this one is whether our protagonist can escape the clutches of the shadowy cabal and get the truth out to the people, but here, it’s just a matter of being able to speed walk and hide; and you don’t even have to be that good at it either. When Mulligan starts his rampage, Alicia manages to escape from him by closing herself up in a very flimsy-looking plexiglass DJ booth, and she’s completely safe, even as he impotently pounds his fists against it. 

Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. Writer and director Jeff Lieberman (perhaps best known for Squirm) really thought he was cooking with this plot, but that didn’t stop him from allowing (or perhaps encouraging) some of Zalman King’s acting choices here. I’m not familiar enough with any of the actor’s other work to say whether or not he’s capable of playing “anxious” with his face, but he’s certainly capable of doing it with his body language, even if the ways that this is displayed are comical. Late in the film, Zipkin meets with a doctor friend (Robert Walden, who turns in the most magnetic performance here, with Winters a close second) in a park to acquire tranquilizers, as part of his scheme to apprehend one of the Blue Sunshine killers without killing them, so that he can have them tested for chromosomal abnormalities that would prove his innocence. They convene discreetly in a public park, and the doctor has to tell Zipkin multiple times to just shake his hand and take the drugs. When he spots a cop, he tells Zipkin to walk away calmly, only to watch as he climbs up an embankment, swinging his arms and legs with Rowan Atkinson level gusto in the most conspicuous getaway possible. 

This movie is also chock full of imminently quotable lines. The police are puzzled why a man who quit his last job because they wouldn’t hire enough women would suddenly turn around and barbecue three of them, but never consider that maybe their first guess isn’t actually correct. A woman consoles another woman about the upcoming anniversary of her divorce by telling her that the worst thing that “Nothing affected [her] more than when The Beatles broke up,” and that “[Her] divorce was nothing compared to that.” And, because watching an hour of Designing Women every day from 1997 to 1999 broke my brain in ways that have never healed, I instantly recognized the woman who tells Zipkin about one of the killings that happened to her neighbor as Bernice (Alice Ghostley), which made that scene even funnier, although I think that it’s being played for comedy intentionally (although you can never be too sure here). The finale of the film takes place in an unoccupied department store that’s part of the mall where Flemming is holding a rally, and everything about the whole sequence is hilarious: the fact that Alicia arranges to meet Mulligan (so he can be arrested) at a discotheque called “Big Daddy’s” inside a mall, the fact that she doesn’t let the fact that she’s technically on a stakeout stop her from getting drunk on martinis, the delivery of the line “There’s a bald maniac in there and he’s going bat shit!,” and even the way that Zipkin recites the entire spiel he was given by a gun shop employee like it’s the Bene Gesserit “fear is the mind killer” speech before he can shoot Mulligan with a tranq dart. 

This one seems to be relatively hard to find; there was a DVD release twenty years ago, but it appears to be long out of print, and there wasn’t a copy of it anywhere in my vast municipal library system. If you get the chance to see it, I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond