Blue Sunshine (1978)

Wrongly convicted of murdering his friends, a man sets out to find the truth and learns that a group of friends who took a tainted batch of drugs are responsible for the deaths and tries to stop their rampage before he gets caught by the police.This here turned out to be quite an excruciating, and at times, barely-passable horror effort. One of the biggest issues with that is the fact that the majority of the film plays off as an investigation movie into the mysterious habits of the murderer who had already struck and was himself put down earlier in the movie, so that means very little screen-time is spent on the lead actually being in danger throughout. It's around a half-hour between the last attack at the party and the second scene where the next victim comes into play, and then it's another twenty-plus minutes again after that before we get to the finale so there's so much searching going on that it really takes a toll on where this one gets its scares from since it's all about who's infected and who isn't, but yet it does nothing to assure that the hero is in any danger throughout by not having others out there just like it. Overall, this creates an immensely plodding, boring film that doesn't have much of anything going on here until we get to the three big scenes in this which are the attack at the cabin, the mother's sudden turn and the final stalking in the department store. Each of these are great fun for their own individual reasons, as the cabin attack is far more gruesome and intense than anything else in here which results in quite a jolt, the mother's attack is based on a continuing storyline that gets paid off nicely, and the finale in the store is just a good-old-fashioned stalking scene in a massive layout with plenty of room to hide and sneak attack on the victims. These here save it, but it's still not as good as it should've been.Rated R: Violence, Language, drug use and children-in-jeopardy.

Checked it out because it was directed by Jeff Lieberman, director of a great underrated slasher called Just Before Dawn. It stars Zalman King. Yeah, the Red Shoe Diaries guy. King plays Jerry Zipkin, who is accused of murdering his friends. But it really wasn't him, it was another guy who lost his hair and went psycho due to some bad LSD (Blue Sunshine) that they all took years before. Zipkin pretty much makes every wrong decision you can possibly make and gets himself deeper and deeper into trouble. The plot is ridiculous and it's hard not to laugh at the bald killers when they trip out and kill people. The sight is pretty silly. Still, Lieberman manages to overcome this and provide some nice atmosphere and genuinely creepy moments. But yes, there's also plenty of unintentionally funny stuff: "We want Dr. Pepper," "If you jerk it won't work," and my personal favorite scene when the sad sack junkie watches Zipkin run away with his money.Also worth mentioning is that the music that is played whenever someone "freaks out" is very similar to the music that was used in Friday the 13th a few years later. All in all, Blue Sunshine is an interesting cheapie that should appeal to most genre fans. There's a sort of Larry Cohenesque quality about it.

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.

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.