Welcome to Los Angeles, where a series of Stanford graduates and ex-acid users are inexplicably losing their hair, going mad, and committing the most gruesome of murders. Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) happens to be attending a party where one of the incidents takes place, and has to evade police and try to solve the cause in order to exonerate himself from blame.Jeff Lieberman ("Squirm"; "Just Before Dawn") writes and directs this spunky and surreptitiously bizarre thriller, and as usual, his own unique flair pervades every scene. At times the film plays out like a corky 1960s European detective thriller, while at others it is surprisingly macabre and unsettling. Other unusual touches make the film stand out prominently, such as the drawn out opening credits: we are given introductory snippets of the characters affected with the hair loss/mania which are interspersed throughout the opening credit roll. After each appearance, the camera reorients itself on an ominous blue moon over which the credits continue to be played. It is idiosyncrasies such as this that "Blue Sunshine" is riddled with, and that's part of its appeal. The film has an episodic feel as well, but the unsettling tone is continuously revived through a jarring and memorably creepy score, as well as the wonderfully executed psychotic breaks of the affected characters (a mad bald woman chasing children with a kitchen knife? Count me in).The acting in the film is a mishmash of solid performances with less-than stellar ones; Zalman King somehow works for the leading part, and Deborah Winters is also memorable as the feisty yet peripheral girlfriend character. The film's prescient disco death blowout is the icing on the cake here, and while it may be a bit anticlimactic overall, the film still holds its ground.Overall, "Blue Sunshine" is one of Lieberman's stranger offerings, but if nothing else, it's an original. There are some seriously creepy scenes that accent the ominous atmosphere, and there is a persistent L.A. noir-ish feel to the proceedings that leave you never quite knowing what to make of any of it at any given moment. Not a film for everyone, and not profoundly terrifying, unless you're an ex-LSD user from Stanford, but it is definitely a one of a kind. 8/10.

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/

I picked this up from GreenCine on a whim, and found it to be interesting, if not particularly suspenseful. It is a combination of violent horror and 70s era paranoia films (e. g. All the President's Men). The plot, in short, follows a young man wrongfully accused of murder who is trying to find out what is causing people in their early thirties to go bald and engage in killing sprees. (Early onset midlife crises???)The performances are nothing to write home about, and the attempt to tack an anti-drug message onto this piece is mainly symptomatic of the anti- drug hysteria that would characterize the Reagan era. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile watch for a slow night.

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.