**There are going to be SPOILERS
ahead**
One night at an intimate party,
pro-am crooner (actually, he’s a photographer) Frannie (Richard Crystal) is revealed as being almost totally bald (with
some scraggly clumps left for creepiness).
Suddenly fueled by bug-eyed rage (and looking like a cross between Kevin McDonald of The Kids In The Hall and Peter
Bark of Burial Ground: The Nights Of
Terror, both of whom, frankly, if you told me they were the same person, I
would believe you), he winds up killing three women by fireplace immolation before
being thrown in front of a truck by our improbable protagonist Jerry (future
softcore bigwig Zalman King). Suddenly finding himself on the run, Jerry
and his honeybunch Alicia (Deborah
Winters) try to get to the bottom of what’s going on while leisurely
avoiding quasi-intrepid copper Lt. Clay (Charles
Siebert).
The first and most prominent
theme at work in Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine is one of pasts, of
skeletons in closets. We all have stupid
things we did when we were young. For
some they were just goofy, kid-type things.
For others they were strikingly disturbing and even downright heinous. It doesn’t matter. The point is these are things we would rather
forget about and have (usually) moved past.
When they arise again, they are both embarrassing and potentially
threatening. After all, we are not the
same people we were then, and for as much as we grow and change over time, much
of our world is shaped by what people think of us in the here and now. For them to discover the unexpected of us is
an obstacle, possibly an insurmountable one.
So we have Jerry’s pal Dr. Blume (Robert
Walden) who dealt drugs to pay for college (this is referenced later on as
well, when a junkie mistakes him for a pusher, even though he is, in fact,
there to pass something off to Jerry…drugs).
We have politician Ed Flemming (Mark
Goddard) who was also a big drug source in college. Frannie dropped acid in the past, though
that’s really his only transgression as far as we’re told. Ed’s estranged wife Wendy (Ann Cooper) did the same, though for
her to admit as much would ruin Ed’s future (this was the Seventies, not the
Nineties). Plus, the fact that their
marriage is broken adds to this sense of shame.
We’ve all heard about people having acid flashbacks, sometimes years
after taking the drug. The brilliance of
this story is that these flashbacks take concrete form in the present. This sin of the past manifests itself in
horrific terms.
In that respect, we have the idea
of movement within social strata for the characters. They were in college around 1968, the height
of the hippie era. They were free
thinkers. They were radicals. They experimented in all manner of ways,
searching for some truth of themselves and some path to a better world (I’m
sure there were those more selfish, to boot).
We see a couple of pictures of Ed that Frannie took back in the
day. One has him shirtless before a
field of swimming colors, the poster boy for turning on, tuning in, and
dropping out (which he naturally did not do himself). The other has him dressed as Uncle Sam giving
the middle finger. Clearly, they were
the counterculture, the outsiders who wanted to shake things up, to rebel. In the present (and only a scant ten years
later on), you have Blume, who is a successful and skilled surgeon. You have Frannie, who is apparently still a
photographer but has traded his tie dye for a tweed blazer, his ripple for
chardonnay. Of course, the one who has
apparently changed the most is Ed. He
has gone from flipping the bird to the Man to being the Man. He has become the establishment he used to
defy. Intriguingly, it brings up the
question of whether they were ever earnest in their earlier beliefs, or was it
just something to do at the time, a phase, and how much did they actually
struggle with their decisions to change?
Or was it more insidious? Did
these changes occur in small increments, like the proverbial longest journey,
with the end being reached after putting one foot in front of the other only to
understand the full extent of the distance covered by looking back at the road
traveled?
Further than this, it brings up
the concept of the monster within. These
characters are all seemingly nice people in their day-to-day lives. They smile, they are kind to people, they
have friends. When they go bald, they
are filled with uncontrollable fury, their minds (and therefore their bodies)
are no longer their own. But everyone
has a dark aspect to them, and here they are turned up to eleven and unleashed. This loss of restraint symbolizes a loss of
self. This is reinforced by the physical
characteristics of these flights of fury.
The victims get intense headaches.
They are blocked from thinking their own thoughts anymore. They have a hyper-sensitivity to sound. They are blocked from hearing the thoughts of
others. They are isolated and removed
from the world, exterior and interior.
The baldness constitutes uniformity and conformity. They all look the same. No blonds, no brunettes, no redheads. Just bug-eyed baldies hellbent on
destruction.
You may have noticed that I have
not talked much about King or his
character Jerry. There are reasons for
this. Number one, the man is not a good
actor. His skills veer toward the
overwrought end of the thespian spectrum.
Further he manages to bring a level of blandness to his character that
can almost be felt physically. With that
in mind, the script doesn’t really pay him much attention anyway, except in his
role as an expositional machine. He strolls
up to people (including the poorly used [though that’s not saying much here] Alice Ghostley, whom I like to think of
as the female Paul Lynde), gives
them no information about himself, and asks wildly intrusive questions. And these people answer them, as if this is
perfectly normal. When he does engage in
any sort of action, it is strictly because the film has been sagging in the
pacing department (probably fat from all the nigh-endless talking). This is the only reason we even have the
character of Lt. Clay, and even he feels like he is simply thrown in to remind
us that Jerry is on the lam. Speaking of
which, for a man supposedly wanted for murder, Jerry makes absolutely no bones
about showing his rather distinctive face in public all over the place. And no one ever recognizes him. Add to that the fact that this entire story
could likely have been cleared up (or at least put on the fast track to
resolution) by the eyewitnesses who saw Frannie snap a band, essentially
constituting an Idiot Plot. But then we
wouldn’t have the mystery of Blue
Sunshine to delve into, which is neither played up for its deeper
implications nor resolved in a satisfactory manner (it wasn’t for me, at any
rate). It aims strictly for the middle
in everything (except King’s
acting). This is the second time I have watched this film. The first go round, I thought it was pretty
good. I have to say, however, that on
second watch it really doesn’t hold up, even under light scrutiny. If I were to recommend a Lieberman film to someone, I have to say it would be Squirm, not this.
MVT: The premise is
compelling, and there are tons of ways it could have been explored, layers that
could easily have been added through allusion alone. None of this comes to pass,
unfortunately. I think this film is one
of those ripe for a remake by someone who can take the core conceit and expand
it logically (think: John Carpenter’s
The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly).
Make Or Break: The Break is
the scene where Jerry interrogates Wendy.
The unlikelihood of Jerry being let into her pad at all is tough to
take. What makes it worse are the ways
the filmmakers utilize to drag out the inevitable conflict in an effort to
build tension. It just doesn’t work, and
none of this is helped by the fact that we’ve seen very similar scenes in the
movie a few times already.
Score: 5.5/10
