Scratches and scuffs have all been carefully removed, as demonstrated by a nice restoration demo piece on the DVD.
JUMPCUT CAFE MOVIE
Taken from the best available 35mm print and running 94m32s, the transfer looked quite nice overall for the time with rich colors and a faint sheen of film grain to remind you that this did indeed play movie houses. The visuals of grimacing bald people running around with butcher knives and plunging off buildings offer some palpable chills, and Lieberman throws in some stylish flourishes like a discotheque attack sequence later aped in Scream 2 of all things.Īn early home video staple courtesy of Vestron, Blue Sunshine disappeared for several years (how appropriate) before resurfacing courtesy of Synapse's premiere DVD in 2003. As usual King's acting ability ranges from mannequin-style passivity to shrieking overacting (no wonder he decided to move behind the camera), but the approach here is kind of appropriate as the film builds to its fever-pitched, department store finale. Blue Sunshine is arguably the slickest and certainly the strangest of the bunch, with bizarre tonal shifts and strange plot U-turns comparable only to Larry Cohen's God Told Me To. He finished his drive-in trilogy five years later with the Deliverance-inspired wilderness terror outing, Just Before Dawn, before settling into more routine cable and home video fare. Jerry also learns that the man responsible for this chemically-induced madness might also a prominent, respectable politician even worse, the decade time bomb embedded in the drug means a whole slew of new killings might begin.ĭirector Jeff Lieberman apparently felt the urge to provide his own twist on various exploitation genres during his early career, starting with rampaging nature (worms, in his case, courtesy of Squirm and continuing with this, a response to the drugsploitation films of the late '60s. Now a man on the run, Jerry consults a friendly doctor (Robert Walden) and follows a trail of clues to track down a chain of potential murderers, all bred from a nasty batch of experimental LSD taken by Stanford college students years before. Good guy Jerry (future Red Shoe Diaries honcho Zalman King) chases the lunatic into the road, where he's promptly run over by a truck and leaves Jerry with all of the blame. The first major warning sign comes at a small party out in the woods, where a crooning party clown, Frannie (played by Billy Crystal's brother, Richard), loses his wig to reveal a bald dome underneath, then promptly goes berserk and kills those around him by stuffing them in the fireplace. In an eerie opening montage, various young adults find their hair falling out and their behavior gradually becoming more aggressive and jittery.
As a horror film there isn't much aggressive shock material on display the unease of Blue Sunshine lies instead in its queasy sense of the mind and body breaking down without any control, all accompanied by a nerve-jangling score that sounds exactly like a musical anxiety attack. In real life they did, of course, as the early 1980s proved, and Blue Sunshine now feels prophetic in its depiction of a post-1960s culture ripping apart at the seams as it tries to dissolve back into normal, capitalist society. The decade really kicked in with the 1973 domestic, commercialized terrors of The Exorcist before plunging into the dangerous territory of David Cronenberg's early works and Philip Kaufman's astonishing 1978 reinvention of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, films which pondered whether all of these psychoanalytic, hot-tubbing, free-wheeling, substance-abusing lifestyles might have some nasty consequences down the road.
Starring Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Mark Goddard, Robert Walden, Charles Siebert, Ann Cooper, Ray YoungĬamera Obscura (UHD / Blu-ray) (Germany R0 4K/HD), Le Chat Qui Fume (UHD / Blu-ray) (France R0 4K/HD), Filmcentrix (Blu-ray & DVD) (US R0 HD/NTSC), Shout! Factory (DVD) (US R1 NTSC), Synapse Films (US R0 NTSC) / WS (1.85:1) (16:9)įor horror fans raised during the slasher glut of the '80s and beyond, adapting to the socially twisted North American terrors of the 1970s can be an uphill battle.
0 kommentar(er)
