BLUE SUNSHINE

Director Jeff Liberman's "Blue Sunshine" (1978). I caught this movie on HBO one night when I was about six or seven years old and it scared me to death. I had been looking for this movie forever. It had been out of print for years. Synapse films finally brought this movie back in print a few years ago and I quickly snagged a copy. It did not live up to the memories I had of it. It is not really very scary, but is still an entertaining piece of cinema.

Blue Sunshine is about a group of people who took some bad blue sunshine acid about ten years ago. Now, they find themselves becoming very irritable, with intense headaches. They pop and eat aspirin like mad, to no avail. Eventually they find themselves losing all their hair and going on a berserk killing spree.

This movie is more of a suspenseful mystery than a horror film. One man, Jerry Zipkin, finds himself at a party where one of the murder sprees take place. He is wrongly accused, and he must piece together the puzzle of what is exactly going on. He wants to clear his name. As he gets more deeply involved in the mystery, he realizes how dangerous these people can become and vows to stop these murder sprees. I don't want to give away too much more because I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

"Blue Sunshine" succeeds as a psychological suspense film, with a well-paced plot that keeps you glued to the screen. Where it fails is as a horror movie. There is very little of the red stuff, and the effects are laughable. When someone loses their hair, it is blatantly obvious that they are wearing a wig. With that being said, some of the murder scenes are still very intense. There is one gruelling scene where a woman is babysitting. The children are screaming out of control, and the woman starts eating aspirin...she cannot take anymore. Suddenly, she loses her hair and goes for the knives, chasing the children around the house.

"Blue Sunshine" is a movie that is well worth your time. For me, it just did not live up to the memories I had of it as a kid. It's still in print, and is pretty easy to find. The soundtrack is especially eerie, and comes packaged with the DVD.