A true product of the seventies, where paranoia and mistrust danced with recklessness and self-possession, Jeff Lieberman's
Blue Sunshine (1978 ) remains by virtue of its vintage a contemporary of both the early body horror meditations of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (
Rabid [1977],
Scanners [1981]) and of such VD scare films as
Stigma (1972) and
Someone I Touched (1975) and could only have been realized in the wake of Alan J. Pakula's nervy political thrillers
The Parallax View (1974) and
All the President's Men (1976). However indebted it may be to existing works (one is tempted to throw into the mix Rudolph Maté's noir classic
D.O.A. [1950]), the flinty $500,000 production proved prescient in its own way, anticipating (or inspiring) the early 80s vogue for stories detailing the diminished returns of the maturing Woodstock generation (e.g. John Sayles'
Return of the Secaucus Seven [1970], Lawrence Kasdan's
The Big Chill [1983]) and the descent towards cynicism and self-destruction of the formerly idealistic and hopeful. A potent cocktail,
Blue Sunshine concerns a potent cocktail - a strain of LSD that, having made the rounds of college campuses during the Summer of Love, begets a time-release epidemic of baldness and psychopathy twenty years down the pike.
Originally budgeted at $3.5 million,
Blue Sunshine was conceived by writer-director Lieberman (whose killer worm movie
Squirm had done solid business at the drive-in in the summer of 1976) on a much broader canvas, with a Manhattan setting and much business occurring below street level, in the corkscrew labyrinth of the metropolitan subway. Eager to lose himself in work after the death of his father, Lieberman elected to move forward with
Blue Sunshine at a fraction of its proposed budget, with shooting in Los Angeles necessitating extensive rewrites that continued through principal photography. Also lost in the downsizing was Lieberman's first choice for a leading man, cost prohibitive TV actor David Birney. Cast in Birney's stead was Zalman King, a one-time contract player who had parlayed guest roles on
Gunsmoke,
The Munsters, and
Adam-12 to the distinction of teen heartthrob thanks to a role opposite Lee J. Cobb on the short-lived courtroom series
The Young Lawyers. An ill-fit for Tinseltown, King drifted into independent production, with personal projects underwritten by psycho roles in
Trip with the Teacher (1975) and
Smile Jenny, You're Dead (1974).
Though playing the film's ostensible hero, the only soul in the City of Angels who understands that the rash of psychotic freak-outs happening all over town is traceable to a single source, King was encouraged by Lieberman to provoke audience suspicion that his beleaguered Jerry Zipkin (aka "Zippy") might turn out to be yet another victim of
Blue Sunshine. Already quirky and intense to begin with, King's tic-hagged performance resulted in one of the strangest movie protagonists of all time, whose erratic, at times childish behavior borders on autism and whose inability to relate to others results in his becoming the prime suspect in a ghastly triple homicide (which, strangely,
Blue Sunshine never tries to top) that serves as the film's inciting incident. Auditioning for a supporting role in the film as an overworked doctor (another potential Blue Sunshine baldy) was Jeff Goldblum, whose appearance and style of acting were deemed to be too similar to King's. The part went instead to Robert Walden (who had worn white coats in
The Hospital [1971] and
Rage [1972] and in the fourth and final season of TV's
The New Doctors) while Goldblum went on to a plum role in Philip Kaufman's better-funded remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
The real fun for viewers of infection/invasion thrillers in general and of
Blue Sunshine in particular is trying to guess at a glance which characters are tainted and potentially dangerous and which remain pure, thick-haired, and sane. Lieberman relies on a visual motif of full moon shots and bald shop mannequins to goose audience anxiety, while focusing on actors with thick helmet hair (burly Ray Young, the hunchback in Al Adamson's
Blood of Dracula's Castle [1969]) or wearing obvious wigs (Bill Cameron, as a beat cop going slowly off the deep end) - though actor Charles Siebert (as the cop on the case) wears a patently obvious hairpiece yet is never offered as a suspect. (Siebert was a last minute addition to the cast, replacing Stefan Gierasch in the detective role when Gierasch suffered a ghastly, off-duty chainsaw injury.) A certain level of social criticism is also part of the equation, with Lieberman dropping the horror squarely into the lap of a generation divided between devotion to duty (via medicine, law enforcement, and politics) and devotion to self; while the film's Typhoid Mary is revealed to be neo-con congressional candidate Mark Goddard (light years away from
Lost in Space), heroine Deborah Winters is etched as a daytime drinker who complicates the film's denouement by slamming down cocktails when she should be keeping vigil.
Remembered with affection by those who saw it in its limited theatrical run in the spring of 1978,
Blue Sunshine took years to earn the status of genre classic, outpaced as it was by the David Cronenberg canon and by the changing genre demographic, which swung wide of thoughtful, brooding horror films after 1980 in favor of the more arguably visceral thrills of the slasher school. (
Blue Sunshine beat John Carpenter's
Halloween to cinemas by five months.) Its use of a disco (mocked up by Lieberman in a "peanuts and sawdust" Los Angeles cowboy bar) as the setting for a scene of nigh apocalyptic rage endeared the film to punk rockers and
Blue Sunshine was often projected behind the bands at Manhattan's premiere punk venue, CBGB. (Additionally, the British supergroup The Glove, formed by Robert Smith of The Cure and Steven Severin of Siouxie and the Banshees, titled their one and only long-playing album after the film.) Helpful write-ups by Michael Weldon in
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1982) and Steven Puchalski in
Slimetime (1996, revised 2002) and the film's presence on VHS tape throughout the 80s helped fatten the cult but the film's original negative had been long lost when attempts at restoration were begun after 2000, an effort that resulted in a commemorative DVD release by Synapse Films in 2003.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Jeff Lieberman, director's audio commentary,
Blue Sunshine DVD (Synapse Films, 2002)
Jeff Lieberman interview, "Lieberman on Lieberman," directed by Howard S. Berger,
Blue Sunshine DVD (Synapse Films, 2002)
