Blue Sunshine (1978)

The greatest movie ever made..!

People are voting emotionally.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This movie starts off with a young man named "Frannie Scott" (Richard Crystal) having a good time at a party with friends. Suddenly something unexpected happens and he ends up killing 3 women and throwing them into the fireplace. Not long afterward, a police detective by the name of "John O'Malley" (Bill Cameron) also kills his wife and the next door neighbor. What both killers have in common are headaches, severe hair loss, nightmares and eventually extreme psychosis. Noticing these similarities, and being suspected in at least 4 murders, "Jerry Zipkin" (Zalman King) seeks to find out some answers to prove his innocence and help stop any further bloodshed. Helping him is his girlfriend, "Alicia Sweeney" (Deborah Winters) and a doctor by the name of "David Blume" (Robert Walden). Anyway, for a low-budget production this film wasn't bad at all. Although it had a "made-for-television" feel to it, it still managed to maintain a decent amount of mystery and suspense for the most part. Slightly above average.

In all honesty, this movie had all of the ingredients in it to be a good and original genre movie and perhaps even a cult-classic but yet ultimately the movie just isn't.It's as if this movie is one big, long, anti-drugs ad, by showing what using drugs can do to you, even when you did this only maybe just once, as long as 10 years ago. But still, the movie its concept remains its strongest point. It's something original, that also really could had worked well, if only the movie got done by a bit more talented people involved, behind the camera's especially.It just isn't a very well made film, or rather said it's lacking in about every way imaginable. The story isn't flowing well because the pacing is a bit off at times and the movie doesn't really succeed in building up its tension properly. The mystery elements and some of the more standard horror elements of its time also get poorly handled, which causes the movie to be a bit too much of an ineffective one. It's such a shame, since this movie obviously had so much more potential in it, judging on its premise and some of the ideas that the movie showed had in it.But another reason why I think the movie doesn't always work out too well is because of its main character, who got played by Zalman King. He has got a good distinctive look to him but zero charisma. He's such a boring guy, who besides doesn't even speak all that much throughout the movie. Why is the main 'hero'? And why should we really care about this person in the first place? At the start of the movie it doesn't even become apparent that this guy is going to be the movie it's main character. He's just a person sitting in the background and he should had stayed there really.It's not like this movie is bad and disappointing because it's a B-type of movie. On the contrary really. The movie is quite unique with both its story and style but unfortunately the style just isn't much good. It's not cheap but just very bland looking all. I don't know, perhaps the film-makers were trying to go for a more realistic approach to the genre but it just never really paid off.I don't want to bash this movie too hard, since I still overall enjoyed it for what it was, it's just so that the movie so obviously could had been a so much better and more effective one, with just a few minor changes to it. Best thing would had been a different director. Jeff Lieberman directed the movie in even perhaps a boring kind of way, that made the movie too often feel like an ineffective one.6/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

After sitting through the most pretentious opening credits in movie history Blue Sunshine begins telling the story of how young Stanford graduates in the 60's took an experimental LSD that has one hell of a bad reaction some ten years later. It seems to render the former user a hairless murdering psychopath! Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King in an all too rare "good guy" role) is mistakenly identified as the murderer of three people instead of his old friend that took the drug many years ago. This leaves Jerry on a mission to not only clear his name but to get to the bottom of what is causing the odd transformations around the city. Eventually all roads lead back to politician Ed Flemming (Major Don West himself, Mark Goddard) who seems to know a lot more than he leads Jerry to believe. Jerry is taught the way of the air-pump pistol in one of the oddest gun scenes in movie history. Did he think he was learning to shoot a howitzer for chrissakes?Brooklyn born director Jeff Lieberman seems to be quite an enigma. While he hasn't done many movies the ones he has directed have at least seem to have interesting angles to them. Too bad others have not seen it that way as both of his films from 1976 later appeared on shows featuring "bad" films: Blue Sunshine on Elvira's Movie Macabre in the early eighties and Squirm which was one of the last episodes of the final season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Don't expect a lot of gore or a lick of nudity as this film has more sophistication than most cult films. Rather the storyline is the strength of this movie which at times can border on the tedious side of things. Not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination as Jerry is on the run for days in the same smelly suit, just not what I expected when I finally tracked this one down. Still, an ambitious film on a tight budget which has more appeal than most of the dreck that comes out of Hollywood today. Give it a watch and don't blame me for what happens ten years later.

I saw this movie over twenty years ago, back when CBS showed late night movies instead of Letterman et al. I thought it was the worst, most poorly produced and thought-out movie ever. Nothing I have seen since has caused me to change my mind. It does not even fall into the "so bad it's good" category. My roommate and I were ridiculing almost every aspect of this disaster.One example: the drug at issue, "Blue Sunshine," supposedly made the victim's hair fall out. The "falling out" consisted of the victim's entire head of hair coming off, all at once, in one piece -- obviously a wig being pulled off. The movie did not so much come to a logical end as, suddenly, the camera pulls back and announces that the movie is over.I remember that the closing credits announced that the film had been produced by "The Blue Sunshine Corporation," leading me to suspect that it was a tax loss project designed to be bad, a la the plot of The Producers. If so, it succeeded.