Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Good concept, poorly executed.

Best movie ever!

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

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.

This movie would be primarily of interest to those who grew up in the late sixties and early seventies and knew what LSD was. I remember a friend who was using the stuff and he warned us that it had different effects on different people. I stayed away from it.Well, maybe it wasn't the people that were the factor, but it was bad LSD like the batch in the movie.I watched it primarily because I remembered Zalmon King from the Red Shoe Diaries and Delta of Venus. Other than that, I can't imagine why I watched this DVD. He did a good job in a mediocre movie. Deborah Winters, who played his girlfriend was also good.No gore; it was people going crazy 10 years later. I guess you better be careful or your past will come back to haunt you.

Jeff Lieberman is unquestionably one of the most fascinating filmmakers active in the field of horror and peculiar cult. The movies he accomplished are versatile and difficult to categorize, and the man himself is a rather unusual persona as well. I read a couple of interviews in which Lieberman claims not to be a fan of the genre at all and in case his films are reminiscent of others (for example "Just Before Dawn" to "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), it must be purely coincidental, as he states never to have seen the films. The last thing you could ever say about "Blue Sunshine", however, is that the idea is derived from something else. Its intriguing concept is totally unique and perhaps one of the most original ones ever to feature in a low-budgeted 70's movie. The outstanding – I even daresay brilliant – premise of "Blue Sunshine" actually makes it all the more painful to acknowledge that the overall execution of the film is slightly disappointing and even a bit boring. The opening sequences as well as the climax are sublime, but unfortunately everything in between moves at an incredibly slow tempo and it's very difficult to stay fully focused the entire playtime. The film opens with footage of several different & seemingly unrelated people beginning to suffer from physical ailments, like terrible headaches and the severe loss of hair. Jerry Zipkin even witnesses one of his friends going completely out of his mind and killing three women. Being the prime suspect in the murder investigation, Jerry discovers that his friend experimented with a type of drugs called Blue Sunshine back in college and possible the side effects only begin to show now, more than 10 years later. Jerry confronts the former junkies, who are now respectable people with important jobs, with their past and hopes to prevent further bloodbaths this way. As said, the plot is magnificent and Lieberman manages to continuously sustain an ominous & moody atmosphere, but the entire middle section lacks panache and memorable substance. Zalman King's performance as Jerry is good but his character is overly weird and not exactly likable. His response to the murders and especially his methods of approaching the other Blue Sunshine users are strange and it's actually no wonder the police suspects him of all the crimes. Don't expect any gory situations, neither, but the hairless psychos look genuinely creepy and menacing. The soundtrack is excellently psychedelic and the sequence shot at the disco is already legendary by now. In spite of Synapse's recent transfer to DVD, the picture quality is rather inferior, which gives a good idea of how obscure this film was all these years. Although not being the masterwork I anticipated (or hoped) it to be, I still wouldn't hesitate to recommend "Blue Sunshine" to any other open-minded fans of eccentric 70's cinema. All the other Lieberman films I've seen thus far ("Squirm", "Just Before Dawn" and "Satan's Little Helper") are worth tracking down as well.

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.