Did you ever wonder what happened to all those rich college kids who went slumming and took acid in the ’60s? Well, according to Jeff Lieberman’s wonderfully off-the-wall Blue Sunshine, 10 years later they all had massive freakouts and brutally murdered everyone around them while in the midst of a mid-life hair-loss crisis. Don’t let this bonkers premise fool you, though. Hidden deep within Blue Sunshine is a surprisingly crafty critique of post-hippy America at the dawn of Reaganism, and its abandonment of ideals in favor of selfish neoliberalism, if you can believe it.
Plus, it has lounge singers throwing people in fireplaces, crazed meatheads rampaging shopping mall discotheques, extensive chromosomic aberrations, and a very off-kilter paranoia about the long-term effects of LSD. And, perhaps in a fit of second sight, Lieberman throws in a line near the end of the film that superbly predicts our current climate under a half-century’s worth of self-serving boomer leadership: “There’s a bald maniac in there. He’s killing everybody.”
Originally published by ASHEVILLE MOVIES.
James is a writer, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.