Blue Sunshine
Entry updated 3 January 2017. Tagged: Film.
Film (1977). Ellanby/Blue Sunshine Co. Written and directed Jeff Lieberman. Cast includes Mark Goddard, Zalman King, Robert Walden and Deborah Winters. 95 minutes. Colour.
Lieberman's first film was a witty (if disgusting) Monster Movie, Squirm (1976) – the last word on killer worms; its novelization was Squirm (1976) by Richard A Curtis. Blue Sunshine, Lieberman's second feature, is also unusually sharp and amusing for a low-budget exploitation movie. Middle-class ex-hippies inexplicably lose their hair and turn homicidal. The culprit turns out to be Blue Sunshine, an LSD variant – the bad acid they dropped a decade earlier has taken its toll on their chromosomes. As Kim Newman puts it in Nightmare Movies (1984; rev 1988), "the flower children have become the Living Dead". The dialogue is good, the metaphor potent. Blue Sunshine is as pointed a film of sf social commentary as any that appeared in its decade, though its theme of human metamorphosis through corrupt Technology perhaps owes something to David Cronenberg. [PN]
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