Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And this is Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2: This week we're discussing a film that's really been on
Speaker 2: the Weird House Cinema list pretty much from the get go,
Speaker 2: and that is Blue Sunshine, a weird independent thriller and
Speaker 2: kind of secret Christmas movie from nineteen seventy seven that
Speaker 2: melds sensationalized media ideas about psychedelics with chilling horror and
Speaker 2: a biting critique of post sixties anxiety and hippie disillusionment.
Speaker 2: It's also, in my opinion, just as cutting today. I mean,
Speaker 2: it has its goofy moments to be cleared. We'll get
Speaker 2: into those which are quite enjoyable, but the terror and
Speaker 2: the anxiety in the picture absolutely holds up, as does
Speaker 2: I think. It's vision of a world in which to
Speaker 2: invoke under s Thompson, the wave of optimism and progress
Speaker 2: as seemingly crashed and fallen back, given way to a
Speaker 2: world that seems to be spinning on, untethered from our will,
Speaker 2: enraptured by commercialism, and at the same time we find
Speaker 2: ourselves taking in more con Man dreams of a better tomorrow,
Speaker 2: perhaps delusions not that dissimilar to the same things that
Speaker 2: we saw as revelations a mere decade ago. And at
Speaker 2: the same time, I think it's also a film about
Speaker 2: the journey out of youth into middle age, out of hope,
Speaker 2: into well, maybe uncertainty.
Speaker 3: I would say that this is the paranoid horror spin
Speaker 3: on the Big Chill. Yeah, but I totally agree with
Speaker 3: what you said about the duality of this movie. I
Speaker 3: would put it in the Suspiria zone, comparing it to
Speaker 3: the Dario Argento film Syspiria, in that it is both
Speaker 3: extremely effective as intended as horror, Like there is some
Speaker 3: of the scary stuff in this movie is terrifying. It
Speaker 3: is it is so so strong, But it is also
Speaker 3: extremely unintentionally funny in the same way that you have
Speaker 3: both of these things in Suspiria. So in Suspiria you
Speaker 3: have great you know, the witch looming out the window
Speaker 3: and the darkness and and those great scenes of terror
Speaker 3: creeping down the hall as the music swells. You know,
Speaker 3: it's great stuff. But then you've also got the bat
Speaker 3: that looks like a pair of rolled up socks and
Speaker 3: the hilarious line deliveries. That's all there. Similar kind of
Speaker 3: thing here, the kind of paranoia and anxiety that this
Speaker 3: movie creates about a the kind of time bomb of unwellness,
Speaker 3: like the idea that you have done something to your
Speaker 3: body and your mind already years ago, and there's no
Speaker 3: way to go back and fix it, and now it
Speaker 3: is just it is just mounting in its takeover of
Speaker 3: your psyche. It's a truly terrifying atmosphere that's created there.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, there is a lot of
Speaker 3: wig stuff in this movies, like people trying to grab
Speaker 3: wigs off people's heads and like bald guys running around
Speaker 3: beating people up in the disco, and it's like truly
Speaker 3: a banquet of many different kinds of movie pleasure all
Speaker 3: packed into one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's more than one scene where the protagonist is
Speaker 2: clearly trying to decide whether he should try and snatch
Speaker 2: that wig or not snatch somebody's hair and see if
Speaker 2: it's a wig, which is just, yeah, kind of inherently goofy.
Speaker 2: But you can't take it away from the film because
Speaker 2: like a lot of the stuff that works so extremely
Speaker 2: well is tied into that concept. Yeah, and yeah, I
Speaker 2: agree on the central paranoia of the piece, something that
Speaker 2: I mean clearly speaks to anyone who is growing older.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't have to have ever consumed an
Speaker 2: illicit drug of any kind to have those kind of
Speaker 2: concerns about, you know, should I have you know, smoked,
Speaker 2: should I have you know, did I drink too much alcohol?
Speaker 2: That I do something unhealthy, that I make some sort
Speaker 2: of choices in my life that are going to come
Speaker 2: back to me, and so forth. And then it does
Speaker 2: tie in, of course, really well then with the experience
Speaker 2: of anyone who has engaged in any of these substances.
Speaker 2: So it works in both ways.
Speaker 3: That's right. It's a kind of Cronenbergian escalation of that
Speaker 3: normal wellness concern where you worry like, oh, is the
Speaker 3: fact that I used to smoke or used to drink
Speaker 3: too much or something? Is that going to come back
Speaker 3: and bite me? These worries about our health, except turn
Speaker 3: that from a general worry about health into a worry
Speaker 3: about your sanity, you know, a worry that it will
Speaker 3: come back and it will turn you into a homicidal maniac.
Speaker 3: Something you did ten years ago that you can't undo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's the basic premises. We'll get into the
Speaker 2: idea that there is a strain of LSD called Blue
Speaker 2: Sunshine that ten years ago, what sixty seven, I think,
Speaker 2: I think the year before the summer I Love people
Speaker 2: took it, but it has been like a ticking time bomb,
Speaker 2: and now ten years later it is starting to transform
Speaker 2: people suddenly rapidly into homicidal maniacs, you know, changing their
Speaker 2: DNA perhaps even you know, adjusting the chromosomes and so forth.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's like these are people who were ten
Speaker 2: years removed from the person they were when they took
Speaker 2: those drugs to begin with.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Now there's another thing I wanted to talk
Speaker 3: about that really stuck out to me on this viewing
Speaker 3: of Blue Sunshine. This is not the first time I've
Speaker 3: seen the movie. My friend Ben showed this to me
Speaker 3: years and years ago. I might have even been in
Speaker 3: high school or maybe early in college when he screened
Speaker 3: this for me at his house, you know, And I
Speaker 3: was really shocked by it then, and it stuck with
Speaker 3: me for years. I think you and I literally talked
Speaker 3: about doing Blue Sunshine ever since the first week we
Speaker 3: were making Weird House Cinema. It was like one of
Speaker 3: the first movies on our list.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is a hugely popular, you know,
Speaker 2: cult status weird film. So yeah, yeah, it's it's been
Speaker 2: on the list since the beginning. I don't know, it
Speaker 2: just seemed too soon somehow, like we haven't earned it yet.
Speaker 3: But anyway, So there was a thing I was going
Speaker 3: to get into, which is an interesting distinction I noticed,
Speaker 3: which separates it from most of the other movies I
Speaker 3: would think of as psychedelic films. There is almost no
Speaker 3: psychedelic imagery or journeying into the mind or the perception
Speaker 3: of people on psychedelics within Blue Sunshine. So there are
Speaker 3: a lot of characters that are clearly having bad psychedelic
Speaker 3: experiences in the movie, but we don't see from their perspective.
Speaker 3: We only see them from the outside behaving erratically. And
Speaker 3: this is really unique. I mean, I think about all
Speaker 3: these other sixties drug movies, psychedelic movies, they all employ
Speaker 3: some kind of like weird imagery to show the psychedelic
Speaker 3: perspective of hallucinations, or they employ camera techniques to show
Speaker 3: visual you know, they do double exposures and weird kind
Speaker 3: of special effects to create that psychedelic viewpoint. This movie
Speaker 3: has really none of that. It's a movie about the
Speaker 3: dark side of extraordinary experiences within the mind, which, in
Speaker 3: its own perspective, the perspective of the camera is committed
Speaker 3: to an almost entirely material meat space picture. Do you
Speaker 3: know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean because I mean, cinematically, the
Speaker 2: psychedelic look was well established by this point, you know,
Speaker 2: and we've all seen I think a lot of most
Speaker 2: of the listeners to Weird House Cinema have seen films
Speaker 2: that have psychedelic elements, you know, swirling colors, you know,
Speaker 2: some sort of groovy in camera technique, or you know,
Speaker 2: even some other kind of like special effect. A lot
Speaker 2: of this stuff was already well established. In fact, the
Speaker 2: Blu Ray that I used to watch Blue Sunshine this
Speaker 2: is the film centric Blu Ray edition. As an extra
Speaker 2: amid some other really cool extras, it features an eighteen
Speaker 2: minute nineteen sixty seven anti drug documentary titled LSD Insight
Speaker 2: or Insanity, and it's terrific, and it contains plenty of
Speaker 2: cliche and even quite inventive psychedelic sequences, you know, like
Speaker 2: swirling colors, people like blurring in and out of existence,
Speaker 2: strange things happening in the mirror.
Speaker 3: I didn't get a chance to watch this in full,
Speaker 3: but you shared it with me and I saw the beginning,
Speaker 3: which was really great because it does not begin like
Speaker 3: showing you people taking tabs of acid and saying like
Speaker 3: the menace that threatens your mind. Instead, it begins by
Speaker 3: showing a bunch of high schoolers and the narrators like
Speaker 3: teenagers love to express themselves, even the boys. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: about like clothes and hairstyles. And I was just like,
Speaker 3: how are we going to get to the acid from this?
Speaker 3: But of course it goes on to like you know,
Speaker 3: show parties. And there's one screen cap I pulled here
Speaker 3: in our chat that's just like a lady with a
Speaker 3: lighter in front of her face that says, why be
Speaker 3: lame baby?
Speaker 2: Yeah, LSD insider insanity. It's it's in full on YouTube,
Speaker 2: so you can find it out there. But but yeah,
Speaker 2: with this film with Blue Sunshine, it seems to make
Speaker 2: a conscious decision to avoid many of the trappings of
Speaker 2: cinematic psychedelia for whatever reason, you know, be it budgetary
Speaker 2: or I think I would be inclined to think it
Speaker 2: is just like an absolute creative choice here. It absolutely works.
Speaker 2: I mean, these are all characters for whom the world
Speaker 2: of psychedelic experience was previously like you know, out there,
Speaker 2: and now at this point in their lives, it is
Speaker 2: very much like receding inside them. You know, they have
Speaker 2: the memories of those days. It's part of who they were,
Speaker 2: maybe only a small part of who they are now,
Speaker 2: and only you know, slightly connected to this world they're
Speaker 2: living in. It's like an echo and therefore, I don't know,
Speaker 2: it kind of makes sense that we don't see it
Speaker 2: as much. All right. My elevator pitch for this one
Speaker 2: is pretty simple. It's maybe you took too much acid. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a right. Let's go ahead and listen to a little
Speaker 2: bit of the trailer audio here.
Speaker 4: The nightmare has begun. Blue Sunshine, Blue Sunshine, It could
Speaker 4: happen to you.
Speaker 2: And we'll come back to discuss some of the marketing
Speaker 2: materials here, Becau, because the marketing materials for Blue Sunshine
Speaker 2: certainly ratcheted up the drug exploitation elements of the picture,
Speaker 2: and you can argue to what extent those elements are
Speaker 2: actually present in the film itself.
Speaker 3: Were they trying to blair which this thing a little
Speaker 3: bit kind of making it like this is real. Blue
Speaker 3: Sunshine is a real phenomenon.
Speaker 2: I think so because if you look at there's one
Speaker 2: poster in particular that I think is just ridiculous and
Speaker 2: it says like, bigger than the title of the film,
Speaker 2: you have warning if you were one of the millions
Speaker 2: who took hallucinogens in the late nineteen sixties, you may
Speaker 2: be a human time bomb about to explode into a
Speaker 2: bloody nightmare of uncontrollable killing. Think back, did you ever
Speaker 2: hear the words blue Sunshine? Try to remember? Your life
Speaker 2: may depend on it. So, I mean, clearly they're getting
Speaker 2: in there.
Speaker 3: I'm of mixed feelings about that because on one hand,
Speaker 3: I feel like that's very strong marketing and it emphasizes
Speaker 3: the effectiveness of the movie, but also like to put
Speaker 3: that on the poster where it's not as clear that
Speaker 3: this is like a thick contrive it. So that's just
Speaker 3: kind of mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like it doesn't like this poster you have to
Speaker 2: really scan down to see like the R rating. Otherwise,
Speaker 2: even the credits don't look like they're not like laid
Speaker 2: out like typical credits, so yeah, it looks like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's just a PSA about about the blue asset.
Speaker 3: To be clear to anybody listening, this is a fictional
Speaker 3: thing in the movie. There's no such thing as Blue
Speaker 3: Sunshine that made people's hair fall out and kill everybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all right, if you want to watch Blue
Speaker 2: Sunshine for yourself, Lucky for you. Numerous special editions of
Speaker 2: this film have come out. It's one of those where
Speaker 2: I feel like they keep coming out with new ones.
Speaker 2: I watched it on the film Centric Blu ray rented
Speaker 2: from Atlanta's own Video Drum. Sign Apps Films also put
Speaker 2: out a great looking Blu ray set with some really
Speaker 2: cool custom sleeves. I think. I think Video Drum also
Speaker 2: has this copy as well, and I'm sure it's streamable. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I watched.
Speaker 3: I watched it streaming.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's get into the people involved here,
Speaker 2: starting at the top with Jeff Lieberman. He's the director,
Speaker 2: he's the writer. He also voices the parrot, which is
Speaker 2: pretty great.
Speaker 3: You know, we had a parrot in our last weird
Speaker 3: house cinema movie, remember, Oh did we? It was the
Speaker 3: rainbow wig guy in Rock and Roll.
Speaker 2: Yes, of course, Oh yes, a humanoid parrot that's.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, who was selling tickets.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah so. Jeff Liberman born nineteen forty seven American
Speaker 2: film director and writer, best known for a trio of
Speaker 2: thrillers that have each gained different levels of cult movie status.
Speaker 2: The first in this trio was nineteen seventy six. Is Squirm,
Speaker 2: a movie about killer earthworms that many of us know
Speaker 2: best from Mystery Science Theater three thousand. This is the
Speaker 2: Now You're Gonna Be the worm Face movie?
Speaker 3: Do I recall that the Mystery Science Theater edit of
Speaker 3: this movie significantly sanitizes the film?
Speaker 2: Yes? Yeah, this is one, and I have to admit
Speaker 2: I haven't watched it in full uncut. I love this
Speaker 2: MST three K episode, but I really owe it to
Speaker 2: Squirm to watch the full cut that has all of
Speaker 2: the like grotesque makeup effects by the legendary Rick Baker,
Speaker 2: lots of worm face action in there that I really
Speaker 2: need to I really need to watch the full uncut picture.
Speaker 2: So that Squirm. Then came this picture Blue Sunshine, and
Speaker 2: then in nineteen eighty one he gave us Just Before Dawn,
Speaker 2: that's a you know, backwood slasher starring George Kennedy. So
Speaker 2: those are kind of the big ones. He also did
Speaker 2: a nineteen eighty eight film titled Remote Control. That looks
Speaker 2: pretty entertaining. We might have to come back to that one.
Speaker 2: He also worked on the screenplay for The never Ending
Speaker 2: Story three in nineteen ninety four. I don't think that's
Speaker 2: that's a good one, but I'm gonna mention it just
Speaker 2: because it connects to the never Ending Story.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's like The Exorcist, where the second one's bad
Speaker 3: with the third one's good. Again.
Speaker 2: I have my doubts. But in the late seventies, Jeff
Speaker 2: Lieberman was that he was a young director with a vision.
Speaker 2: That's the way A actor Robert Walden, who will come
Speaker 2: back to in a minute, described him in an interview
Speaker 2: that's one of the extras on the disc that I watched.
Speaker 2: It described him as a young, really kind of egotistical director,
Speaker 2: but with a firm, uncompromising vision for the cinematic world
Speaker 2: in the story he wanted to create. He knew exactly
Speaker 2: what he wanted to tell here, and he said in interviews.
Speaker 2: Lieberman has that he didn't see Blue Sunshine at all
Speaker 2: as an anti drug film. He himself had experiences with
Speaker 2: LSD that I don't know the way he was describing them.
Speaker 2: Some of the extras they sounded on the whole positive. He's,
Speaker 2: you know, admittedly he's a weird dude, and he talks
Speaker 2: about how LSD made him realize that he was so
Speaker 2: weird and he was always going to be a little
Speaker 2: removed from normal, mondane society. But but yeah, he said
Speaker 2: that one of the things he set out to do
Speaker 2: with Blue Sunshine was to use the anti drug paranoia
Speaker 2: and propagon propaganda present in the media as a kind
Speaker 2: of science fiction skeleton upon which to build his story,
Speaker 2: which so he compares it ultimately to the bad science
Speaker 2: of radioactive mutation in atomic D movies of the fifties.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting because I was kind of wondering about
Speaker 3: this while we were thinking about Jeff Lieberman. Here I
Speaker 3: realized a point of comparison and a film with I
Speaker 3: think you could argue similar themes. Is Penos Cosmotos is
Speaker 3: Beyond the Black Rainbow.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm certain that Blue Sunshine was a major influence.
Speaker 2: I'm Beyond the Black Rainbow, and you know, in some
Speaker 2: of its themes of you know, post sixties disillusionment and
Speaker 2: also like mega tripping bald psychopaths.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a point of view I can
Speaker 3: sympathize with, even though I don't have an overall negative
Speaker 3: view of psychedelics, and I'm not sure that I would
Speaker 3: suspect that penos Cosmatos does, and as you say, Lieberman
Speaker 3: apparently did not either. But I think it's kind of
Speaker 3: interesting to explore the dark, arker side of thing, because
Speaker 3: darker side of this thing, because you do end up
Speaker 3: with these people who are kind of psychedelic evangelists, you know,
Speaker 3: these people like Timothy Leary who became famous for preaching
Speaker 3: the virtues of taking psychedelics and saying, you know, all
Speaker 3: the good things that it would do for your for
Speaker 3: your mind, And I don't know. I think I have
Speaker 3: a more balanced view on it, which takes the idea
Speaker 3: of mind expansion somewhat seriously. But of course your mind
Speaker 3: can expand in good or bad ways, and you know,
Speaker 3: without the right kind of without the right kind of
Speaker 3: guidance and framing of a psychedelic experience, you can imagine
Speaker 3: it could make you a worse person. It just sort
Speaker 3: of like opens up possibilities of personal change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we did a whole series on
Speaker 2: psychedelics years back. Those episodes should be available in the
Speaker 2: archives stuffed about your mind. And yeah, one of the
Speaker 2: things that we stress there is that, yeah, but bad
Speaker 2: trips do happen, and psychedelic experiences in general tend to
Speaker 2: have they tend to not be just like the rosy, colorful,
Speaker 2: cinematic psychedelic experience that you see in like some of
Speaker 2: these psychedelic films. So it's yeah, and then on top
Speaker 2: of that, without getting you know, super into you know,
Speaker 2: the science and history of psychedelics like it does not,
Speaker 2: they don't, they tend not, they don't work well with
Speaker 2: everyone's brain chemistry, and some people absolutely should not take them.
Speaker 2: So yeah, all of all of those caveats very much
Speaker 2: in place here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I think there is an interesting cultural
Speaker 3: role for films like this as a kind of not
Speaker 3: that you should take Blue Sunshine seriously as like a
Speaker 3: scenario that would actually unfold, but because on one hand,
Speaker 3: you do have psychedelic evangelists who are out there, I
Speaker 3: think over selling the unalloyed virtues of psychedelics just like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's perfect, it's it's all good, everybody should do it.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, it's you know, you can get
Speaker 3: a balance, you can get some people spinning out these
Speaker 3: these overly negative scenarios and showing the kind of the
Speaker 3: side of disillusionment and destruction.
Speaker 2: And then also in the same way that like really rosy,
Speaker 2: you know, tinted psychedelic sequences in films are very entertaining.
Speaker 2: Dark psychedelia is also very entertaining, and so yeah, I
Speaker 2: think we need both just as filmgoers. All right, let's
Speaker 2: get into the cast here, starting at the top with
Speaker 2: the character Jerry Zipken. We're gonna be talking about Jerry
Speaker 2: Zipkin quite a bit here, played by Zalman King, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen forty two through twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: Just let me compare two things, the experience of watching
Speaker 3: Blue Sunshine versus how everybody seems to write and talk
Speaker 3: about him, which is like, this is the handsomest, sexiest
Speaker 3: guy who has ever lived. I'm not trying to insult him.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, yeah, it's a good looking guy and
Speaker 3: all that, but his vibe in the movie is weird.
Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe it's just the character he's playing
Speaker 3: in Blue Sunshine, but he does not come off like
Speaker 3: a hunk of burn in love in this movie, even
Speaker 3: though he is rather lovey dovey in some scenes. Mostly
Speaker 3: he comes off as a weird, obsessed guy who is
Speaker 3: on a different frequency than everybody else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and is on the run from authority throughout most
Speaker 2: of the pictures. So uh so, Yeah, but yeah, when
Speaker 2: you hear when you hear people talk about him, like again,
Speaker 2: coming back to that Robert Walden interview on the Blu Ray, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he talks about how just like effortlessly charming and sexy
Speaker 2: Zaman King was and how you know, how how well
Speaker 2: he worked with with female co stars, and but at
Speaker 2: the same time he also talks about just like and
Speaker 2: and I think this is something we do see in
Speaker 2: his performance, about how intense and stripped down his performances
Speaker 2: at times, Like he's definitely like manic and freaking out
Speaker 2: at times. But then there are there are a lot
Speaker 2: of scenes where you know often talk about, you know,
Speaker 2: performances where it's all in the eyes and you can
Speaker 2: see the gears turning behind the eyes, and we definitely
Speaker 2: get that from King in.
Speaker 3: This There are scenes where it seems like he should
Speaker 3: be saying more, but he's just totally silent. And then
Speaker 3: there are other scenes where he's suddenly screaming and I
Speaker 3: don't understand why.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he's having a rough time. Yeah, but yeah, so.
Speaker 2: Zalman King, actor turned director and producer. His acting credits
Speaker 2: go back to the mid sixties. He even pops up
Speaker 2: in a sixty five episode of The Munsters playing some
Speaker 2: sort of like bearded hipster or something.
Speaker 3: Is he like an egor character?
Speaker 2: I don't know, he's like I think he's credited as
Speaker 2: like bearded dude or something. But he did a lot
Speaker 2: of TV westerns and the like, but his film career
Speaker 2: took off more in the nineteen seventies. He's probably best
Speaker 2: known for acting in Well This There's nineteen seventy six
Speaker 2: is the Passover plot. He's also in nineteen eighty one's
Speaker 2: Galaxy of Terror. He also shows up in a film
Speaker 2: I watched in the last couple of years, nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: two's Endangered Species. That's a tight little cattle mutilation film
Speaker 2: by Alan Rudolph. It's only a very small Zalman King,
Speaker 2: Zaman King performance, very small part. But he was a
Speaker 2: producer on that picture.
Speaker 3: That's not the one we watched, No, the one we
Speaker 3: watched that had.
Speaker 2: We watched The Return, The Return, Oh yeah, that was
Speaker 2: The Return Leans into the other Worldly causes of cattle mutilation,
Speaker 2: whereas I don't want to spoil anything, but I just
Speaker 2: say in Dangered Species, it's more of like a straight
Speaker 2: up real world thriller.
Speaker 3: Oh, I just looked it up. Yeah, this was the
Speaker 3: Martin Landau Jan, Michael Vincent and Sybil Shepherd.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the one we watched.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the Return and Vincent Chiavelli.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Yeah, that episode
Speaker 2: is of Weird Hoouse Cinemas in the archives.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The first place I heard of Zalmon King though, was
Speaker 2: this is during the nineteen nineties. He had an erotic
Speaker 2: drama anthology series titled Red Shoe Diaries, and I think
Speaker 2: it was sometimes marketed as Zalman King's Red Shoe Diaries.
Speaker 2: And I don't know where I was hearing ads for it,
Speaker 2: because I don't think I ever watched it. But it
Speaker 2: was a showtime series, so maybe it was on on
Speaker 2: a showtime preview, maybe it was in syndication. I'm not sure,
Speaker 2: but the name Zalmon King it captured my young attention,
Speaker 2: and indeed Zaman King made a name for himself directing
Speaker 2: and producing motion pictures of a sensual and erotic nature.
Speaker 2: These include nineteen eighty eight's Two Moon Junction, eighty nine's
Speaker 2: Wild Orchid, nineteen ninety two's Red Shoe Diaries, which inspired
Speaker 2: the series, and nineteen ninety five's Delta of Venus. Of these,
Speaker 2: I've only seen Delta of Venus, but as I recall,
Speaker 2: it's been a long time, but it was a beautifully
Speaker 2: shot piece inspired by the works of an I nin
Speaker 2: So I'm no expert on this genre, but I'd say
Speaker 2: you might roughly classify it as fairly high minded erotica.
Speaker 2: He also produced Nine and a Half Weeks.
Speaker 3: I was just trying to think why I'd heard of
Speaker 3: Red Shoe Diaries, but I looked it up and David
Speaker 3: Ducoveney was in this, So there you go.
Speaker 2: That's a why is that the movie or the TV series?
Speaker 3: Let's see it is the anthology series.
Speaker 2: Okay, there you go.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, how is it? How does it star David
Speaker 3: Ducoveney If it's in anthology, Maybe he's just in the
Speaker 3: first episode.
Speaker 2: Maybe he's like the crip Keeper, he's the sexy crypt keeper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, David Dukovny, Why don't you love me?
Speaker 2: Yeah? All right, Moving on through the rest of the cast,
Speaker 2: Deborah Winters plays Alicia Sweeney. This is Zipken's romantic interest.
Speaker 2: Winters was born in nineteen fifty three. Prior to this,
Speaker 2: she'd done several films, including nineteen seventies The People next Door,
Speaker 2: seventy one's Cotch, seventy three's Class of forty four. Other
Speaker 2: film credits include nineteen eighty sevens The Outing and nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy sevens Tarantula's The Deadly Cargo.
Speaker 3: Oh, I gotta look that up. We're covering that. I
Speaker 3: don't even know. I don't know anything, but it's going
Speaker 3: on the list.
Speaker 2: Her last film was the nineteen ninety two TV movie
Speaker 2: Behind the Mask. She was also on TV's Gemini Man
Speaker 2: starring Den Murphy, but is not in the MST three
Speaker 2: K movie cut of Gemini Man that was titled Writing
Speaker 2: with Death. I'd say Winters is good in this. I
Speaker 2: don't think I've seen her in anything else, but like
Speaker 2: pretty much everyone in Blue Sunshine, she gives a believable
Speaker 2: performance with the caveat a caveat here about when characters
Speaker 2: actually freak out and become homicidal maniacs, but in terms
Speaker 2: of like just normal human interactions, when people were playing
Speaker 2: like regular characters. Everyone's really good in this and her
Speaker 2: character is a character with agency and intuition.
Speaker 3: She is good. Though I don't know if you agree
Speaker 3: with this. I would say the tone of her performance
Speaker 3: is different from everybody else in the movie. I would
Speaker 3: say everybody else is playing it a little bit straighter,
Speaker 3: and she is playing it a little bit whimsical. Do
Speaker 3: you know what I'm talking about? Like she is treating
Speaker 3: this movie slightly more like a comedy than everybody else.
Speaker 3: For everybody else it's zero, She's on like fifteen or
Speaker 3: twenty percent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's yeah. It is kind of like
Speaker 2: she is in a sitcom or not a sitcom maybe,
Speaker 2: but let's say like a lighthearted TV drama titled Blue Sunshine,
Speaker 2: whereas everyone else is in the gritty nineteen seventies thriller.
Speaker 3: Like she has a little bit of a like roll
Speaker 3: your eyes and look at the camera energy and all
Speaker 3: everybody else's wigs are coming off and they're attacking strangers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but she's in a lot of scenes with Zalman King,
Speaker 2: so it could just be like it's that natural charisma,
Speaker 2: just like lightning the mood. Maybe a little too much,
Speaker 2: all right, Next up, we have Mark Goddard playing Edward Fleming.
Speaker 2: This is our sixties psychedelic guru turned seventies politician.
Speaker 3: I was thinking of this guy as what if the
Speaker 3: Richard Lynch character from God told me to left Gurudam
Speaker 3: and decided to run for office.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think we mentioned panoscos Modos already, But
Speaker 2: the character from his film Mandy Jeremiah Sand I think
Speaker 2: is kind of an extrapolation in some ways of this character,
Speaker 2: at least the the hints we have about who this
Speaker 2: character was prior to the nineteen seventies. Because that's one
Speaker 2: of the interesting things about this character, Edward Fleming. There's
Speaker 2: so much implied about who he was, and we don't
Speaker 2: get to see any of it aside from a single image,
Speaker 2: like a single photograph, and that photograph carries a lot
Speaker 2: of weight, like it really forces we imagine so much
Speaker 2: just from that one little thing, and it ultimately delivers
Speaker 2: more than a dozen flashbacks would have. So Mark Goddard
Speaker 2: lived nineteen thirty six through twenty twenty three, perhaps best
Speaker 2: remembered by many anyway as Major Don West on the
Speaker 2: original Lost in Space series. He was like the military dude.
Speaker 2: He has a cameo as a general in the nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight film adaptation of Lost in Space, which, because
Speaker 2: I recall, is pretty weird in its own right.
Speaker 3: With the one with Joey from Friends in it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but even more importantly, it had Gary Oldman as
Speaker 2: Doctor Smith and he like eventually mutates into a giant
Speaker 2: spider thing. Yeah, all right, it's good, or at least
Speaker 2: that good. It's good. I bet that's what I remember.
Speaker 3: I recall. I don't know why I recall that, being
Speaker 3: in the early days of DVD players, that being just
Speaker 3: like a DVD you saw everywhere. They must have made
Speaker 3: more copies of it than anything else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it felt very sleek in advance for the time,
Speaker 2: as I recall. So anyway, God it was mostly a
Speaker 2: TV actor who appeared on such westerns and mystery series
Speaker 2: as Johnny Ringo, The Detectives, and of course Lost in Space.
Speaker 2: His other film credits include nineteen eighty three Strange Invaders
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy four's Death Squad. All right, Next, we
Speaker 2: have this character, doctor David Bloom, played by Robert Walden,
Speaker 2: who I've mentioned already. Born in nineteen forty three, He's
Speaker 2: our stressed out surgeon and friend of ZIPKNS. Robert Walden
Speaker 2: was nominated for three Primetime Emmys for his work on
Speaker 2: what seems to I don't know. I'd never heard of
Speaker 2: this before, so it feels like maybe a kind of
Speaker 2: forgotten successful TV series titled Lou Grant which in seventy
Speaker 2: seven through eighty two. Did you know about this series?
Speaker 3: This is a spinoff of Mary Tyler Moore. Luke Grant
Speaker 3: is Mary Tyler Moore's boss.
Speaker 2: There you go ed Asner, right, yeah, yeah, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: well this is yeah, this is the ed Asner spinoff series.
Speaker 2: I've never seen anything from this series, but apparently it
Speaker 2: was popular and Robert Walden must have been good on it,
Speaker 2: and I totally believe it based on his work here
Speaker 2: in Blue Sunshine, because again, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: solid performances in this picture, but Walden's was the one
Speaker 2: that instantly jumped out of me as being like a
Speaker 2: very lived in portrayal, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you really do feel for this character because
Speaker 3: the movie plants these seeds of worry in its opening scenes.
Speaker 3: Like the opening the credits of the movie keep intercutting
Speaker 3: with these vignettes of characters having mounting tension and headaches.
Speaker 3: And stress as the camera Kinnel like zooms in on
Speaker 3: their face and really implies there's something wrong with their brain.
Speaker 3: And this character gets that treatment, and we see other
Speaker 3: characters in these vignettes have psychotic episod and then you
Speaker 3: get to know more of this character because he's a
Speaker 3: good friend of the protagonist and you really worry for him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as he explains in the extras that he'd been
Speaker 2: hard up for work for a period there in the
Speaker 2: mid seventies, but then his performance in nineteen seventy six
Speaker 2: is All the President's Men really stirred things back up again,
Speaker 2: and he started getting all these different scripts and inquiries.
Speaker 3: Who was he? And All the President's Men?
Speaker 2: You know, I've never seen All the President's Men, but
Speaker 2: he's like, you know, fourth or fifth down, So it's
Speaker 2: you know, a sizeable supporting role. Li I'm to assume.
Speaker 3: Oh I just looked it up. He played one of
Speaker 3: Nixon's lawyers.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah, So All the President's Men comes out
Speaker 2: is a big enough hit that he starts getting all
Speaker 2: these scripts and he starts saying yes to everything, including
Speaker 2: Blue Sunshine, and in his career really you know, picks
Speaker 2: up from there from that point on out, certainly because
Speaker 2: of All the President's Men. Maybe not some much Blue Sunshine,
Speaker 2: but he's great in this. In His many film credits
Speaker 2: include nineteen seventies Bloody Mama, seventy Two's Rage, and two
Speaker 2: Pictures of Note from seventy seven, Capricorn one and Audrey Rose.
Speaker 3: I liked Robert Waldon in Blue Sunshine and Rob you
Speaker 3: should see All the President's Men.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I should. It's a classic, you know, great cast
Speaker 2: and all. But yeah, I'll have to put it on
Speaker 2: the list. It's not one we can ever do for
Speaker 2: Weird House. So sometimes it's hard for me to get
Speaker 2: around to these films that are that are not weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, non fiction, political journalism, thriller, that's not really our
Speaker 3: that's not really our zone on the show. But it
Speaker 3: is really good.
Speaker 2: If it was all the presidents were wolves now. But yeah,
Speaker 2: let's see, alright, you know, we got to have a
Speaker 2: police inspector. We got to have a detective in a
Speaker 2: film like this, and that's Detective Clay played by Charles Siebert,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen thirty eight through twenty twenty two. Basically
Speaker 2: established character actor of the seventies and nineties, was in
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff, including seventy eights Coma, seventy nine's
Speaker 2: Justice for All. Did a lot of TV, like a
Speaker 2: lot of episodes of Trapper John MD, and he directed
Speaker 2: some Trapper John MD, which led to a lot of
Speaker 2: other TV directorial work. He directed episodes of such shows
Speaker 2: Silk Stockings, Mortal Kombat Conquest, and both Hercules and.
Speaker 3: Zena Mortal Kombat Conquest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, somebody had to direct them. You've got to have
Speaker 2: somebody direct these shows, so, you know, hats off to
Speaker 2: the folks who step up and you take one for
Speaker 2: the team.
Speaker 3: I don't really recall anything about him in Blue Sunshine.
Speaker 3: He's sort of a functional character. He's there to facilitate
Speaker 3: the plot mechanics.
Speaker 2: That's right now. The next character is far more impressive,
Speaker 2: and that is the character of Wendy Fleming. This is
Speaker 2: the the X of the politician Fleming that we already mentioned,
Speaker 2: played by Ann Cooper. Yeah, great role.
Speaker 3: This is such a pitiable movie character like you spend
Speaker 3: I don't know, a good quarter of the runtime just
Speaker 3: feeling excruciatingly bad for Wendy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's damned, there's no doubt about it. And you
Speaker 2: pretty much know that from the get go, because she's
Speaker 2: on the cover. She's on the poster for pretty much
Speaker 2: any any poster, any box for a blue Sunshine you
Speaker 2: might pick up. You know, we see like the woman
Speaker 2: with the bald head and the and the intense eyes
Speaker 2: and so forth. So you have a sense that something
Speaker 2: bad is coming. And I think she's pretty great in
Speaker 2: the role. Again, a doomed, doomed role, doomed character, but
Speaker 2: quite a quite a fine performance in my opinion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Now, this is Anne Cooper without an E, not to
Speaker 2: be confused with Anne Cooper with an E, who was
Speaker 2: also active at the same time and pops up in
Speaker 2: some you know, some genre pictures as well. Our Anne
Speaker 2: here was a regular in the short lived Blue Thunder
Speaker 2: TV series in nineteen eighty four, which also featured Dana Carvey.
Speaker 2: This was a spin off of the nineteen eighty three
Speaker 2: Dan O'Bannon pinned helicopter movie. I have never seen the
Speaker 2: TV series, but I I love Blue Thunder when I
Speaker 2: was a kid.
Speaker 3: Wait, I don't know what it's a helicopter TV show?
Speaker 2: Yes, so Blue Thunder the movie is about a like essentially,
Speaker 2: the police start using like a super super copter to
Speaker 2: go after criminals and a lot of helicopter Shenanigans ensue.
Speaker 2: It is not a kid's movie, but I somehow saw
Speaker 2: this one when I was a bit young.
Speaker 3: Do the criminals have helicopters too? Otherwise it seems kind
Speaker 3: of unfair.
Speaker 2: The criminals don't have a helicopter. But eventually Malcolm McDowell
Speaker 2: is in a small helicopter and there's like a big
Speaker 2: helicopter like dogfight. So I loved it when I was young.
Speaker 2: I have no idea how it stacks up today. All right,
Speaker 2: Let's see another one more like main cast actor to
Speaker 2: mention here, and that is Ray Young, who plays Wayne Mulligan,
Speaker 2: Big Wayne Mulligan. Ray Young lived nineteen forty through nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine. He was a six foot six actor active
Speaker 2: in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, a lot of TV,
Speaker 2: but some rather fun credits. His first credited role is Mango,
Speaker 2: the hunchback in sixty nine's Blood of Dracula's Castle starring
Speaker 2: John Carradine, and he was also in Five Bloody Graves
Speaker 2: the same year. Subsequent film roles include parts in seventy
Speaker 2: three's Coffee, eighty six is Hunter's Blood and on TV.
Speaker 2: His credits include everything from Bewitch, Bonanza, and Gun Smoke
Speaker 2: to Quantum Leap and Star Trek Deep Space nine, and
Speaker 2: he played Bigfoot in sixteen episodes of The Croft Super Show.
Speaker 3: The premise of this character is so simple and yet
Speaker 3: so effective. So the scenario is people, without warning are
Speaker 3: are randomly like going berserk and attacking everyone around them.
Speaker 3: And one of the guys in the mix just happens
Speaker 3: to be gigantic. Yeah yeah, and sot you just wonder like,
Speaker 3: uh oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this guy goes off. It's not good for
Speaker 2: anybody because when they go off, one of the details
Speaker 2: is that they're they also have super strength. I mean
Speaker 2: not too in a degree where it's like magical and
Speaker 2: unrealistic perhaps, but like really strong. Yeah, all right, this
Speaker 2: is just a bit roll. I have to mention this.
Speaker 2: I realize I don't need to mention every like model
Speaker 2: turned actress who pops up in a bit part in
Speaker 2: a genre picture. But there's a campaign girl she's credited
Speaker 2: as Campaign Girl that pops up late in the picture,
Speaker 2: and she's played by Marcy Hanson born nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 2: model turned actress, mostly in TV shows through about nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five. But of note, she was the Playboy Playmate
Speaker 2: of the Month for October nineteen seventy eight. That's the
Speaker 2: month I was born, so she is essentially my zodiac sign.
Speaker 2: She is not on the cover of this Playboy though,
Speaker 2: because and I've never I've never even looked at this Playboy.
Speaker 2: But you're familiar with it. You probably are picturing this
Speaker 2: is the one that had Dolly Parton on the cover.
Speaker 2: Oh don't she has, you know, the bunny ears and
Speaker 2: all that's apparently this edition of Playboy magazine.
Speaker 3: Hats off to you, Dolly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is just a quick bit of trivia. But
Speaker 2: Sandy King John Carpenter's frequent producer and script supervisor. The
Speaker 2: two were married in nineteen ninety. She was script supervisor
Speaker 2: on this picture.
Speaker 3: Interesting crossover. Didn't expect that.
Speaker 2: And then finally getting to the music. The music here
Speaker 2: is a score by Charles Gross, who was born nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty four, apparently still with American composer who worked in film, TV, cartoons,
Speaker 2: in industrial films. His biggest film scores were probably eighty
Speaker 2: nine's Turn in Hooch and nineteen nineties Air America, two
Speaker 2: films that I assume are not really sought after by
Speaker 2: vinyl soundtrack and score collectors, but clearly big pictures. Other
Speaker 2: scores of his from this time period include nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: five's Have a Nice Weekend and the nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 2: TV movie Siege. I can't speak to any of those
Speaker 2: other scores, but his work on Blue Sunshine, I think
Speaker 2: is excellent and it's a huge part of the film's
Speaker 2: effectively creepy.
Speaker 3: Aur I absolutely agree the music is highly effective. I
Speaker 3: don't know exactly what the creative process was here, but
Speaker 3: I was just imagining that I don't know, the director
Speaker 3: came to the composer and said, this is the feeling
Speaker 3: I want to go for, you know, paranoia, that there's
Speaker 3: something wrong with you and that it could suddenly erupt
Speaker 3: and take over your mind. And then the composer came
Speaker 3: back with this and it was just bingo, exactly exactly
Speaker 3: what the movie needs. And so there's like this opening
Speaker 3: song that we get when we first have the credits
Speaker 3: of the film, where you're like looking at the full
Speaker 3: moon and the black sky and you hear these eerie,
Speaker 3: hollow rhythms playing on a marimba, and then there is
Speaker 3: this lead that comes in. That's kind of a dissonant,
Speaker 3: high droning sound. It's a little bit electronic but also
Speaker 3: hard to place. And it's just this feeling of something
Speaker 3: inside you getting worse and worse. It is the ultimate
Speaker 3: I got the bad acid sound. I was trying to
Speaker 3: think of what to compare it to. The instrumentation of
Speaker 3: this main pair of noia trac kind of reminds me
Speaker 3: of the feeling of do you know this song Claphands
Speaker 3: by Tom Waits.
Speaker 2: I don't know this one though.
Speaker 3: Oh it's a great song, but similar kind of paranoid,
Speaker 3: bad acid feeling.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah, it's this score. It plays with a
Speaker 2: little bit with what I think of as the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies night gallery jazz sound. You know, it's it's got
Speaker 2: unsettling bits of discordant percussion. There are those synth flourishes,
Speaker 2: and there's there's at least one dose of sleigh bells
Speaker 2: in the mix. I don't know if you noticed the
Speaker 2: sleigh bells, but I'm pretty sure we hear sleigh bells
Speaker 2: at one point. Christmas movie, Yeah, I gotta have slagh
Speaker 2: bells if it takes place at Christmas. But more to
Speaker 2: the point, yeah, the score I think really captures a
Speaker 2: feeling of an order falling apart into a disorder, the
Speaker 2: illusion of sanity into madness and hope into I don't know,
Speaker 2: the status quo.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The score, by the way, is available on disc, at
Speaker 2: least as part of the film Centric Blu ray, So
Speaker 2: when I got it from Videodrome, I was able to
Speaker 2: pop the CD in to the player in my I
Speaker 2: guess ancient automobile and play a little bit of the
Speaker 2: Blue Sunshine score as I drove around town. And We're
Speaker 2: going a bit long here, but I'm just gonna mention
Speaker 2: in passing that there are also vocal tracks on the
Speaker 2: soundtrack that are performed by the Humane Society for the
Speaker 2: Preservation of Good Music. They include such tracks as Disco Blue,
Speaker 2: this is going to be in our disco sequence late
Speaker 2: in the picture, and then there's also a track called
Speaker 2: Blue Sunshine.
Speaker 3: Do they have lyrics about Acid?
Speaker 2: I didn't have time to really get into the lyrics
Speaker 2: of Disco Blue, but I don't know. Maybe they're about Acid.
Speaker 3: I think it was in our Flash Gordon episode that
Speaker 3: we were talking about that rare thing of movies with
Speaker 3: soundtracks made for the film that have lyrics about the
Speaker 3: plot of the film. You know, Flash Gordon has that
Speaker 3: with the Queen songs, but they're saying otherwise. It seems
Speaker 3: fairly rare in a non musical movie, but it would
Speaker 3: be hilarious. Of Blue Sunshine is another example.
Speaker 2: I think it may be. Yeah, I don't remember the
Speaker 2: track Blue Sunshine, but I do remember disco blit.
Speaker 3: Wait, is that what plays in the disco scene?
Speaker 2: It is?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, Well, folks were about to get into the plot,
Speaker 5: and you should know that this all leads up to
Speaker 5: a disco horror climax.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fittingly, fittingly so.
Speaker 3: The action of the movie opens in a hospital in
Speaker 3: the hallway in a hospital, and into frame comes the
Speaker 3: first of the major characters. We meet doctor David Bloom,
Speaker 3: played by Robert Walton, and when we meet him, he
Speaker 3: does not look so good. He's got his white coat
Speaker 3: hanging open. He looks disheveled, pale, with circles under his eyes.
Speaker 3: He is a doctor, but it looks like he has
Speaker 3: not had a good night's sleep in weeks. He stops
Speaker 3: at a water fountain to throw back a couple of
Speaker 3: pills before going on to visit one of his patients,
Speaker 3: and one thing I will note is it seems I
Speaker 3: can't say exactly how, but somehow to fit into the
Speaker 3: same kind of theme as like not ever showing us
Speaker 3: the psychedelic experience, not having any of the flashbacks. We
Speaker 3: see a lot of characters taking drugs in the movie,
Speaker 3: but they're not psychedelic drugs. They're like throwing back pills
Speaker 3: to stop some kind of pain or distress.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, some sort of prescription pharmaceuticals or over the
Speaker 2: counter medicine. We're not always entirely sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So anyway, he takes his pills. Then he goes
Speaker 3: to visit a patient who's an older woman lying in
Speaker 3: a hospital bed, and even she notices that he looks exhausted.
Speaker 3: She asks him, doctor, aren't you eating? And he tries
Speaker 3: to put her fears to rest. He says, you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes there's just a little too much aggravation in his job,
Speaker 3: and he's so he's trying to assure her, but on
Speaker 3: his way out of the room, she stops him and
Speaker 3: she says, with some desperation, Doc, are you gonna have
Speaker 3: to cut me up again? And it kind of seems
Speaker 3: like the question is just too much for him, Like
Speaker 3: his bedside manner collapses, like he can't just keep being positive,
Speaker 3: and he says, we'll see, and then we see there's
Speaker 3: some kind of pressure building in him. His gaze goes
Speaker 3: sharp and far off, like he just had a horrible thought.
Speaker 3: And then this high pitched, droning sound returns from the
Speaker 3: soundtrack at the beginning, and we zoom on his face
Speaker 3: and he begins to furiously rub his temples with his fingers,
Speaker 3: trying to make the pain stop, and we cut to black.
Speaker 3: And this is a theme we'll see with a number
Speaker 3: of characters through the movie, this kind of like zoom
Speaker 3: in on the face as they look pained and distressed
Speaker 3: and it's like something is happening in their brain.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now here we return to what we saw before this scene,
Speaker 3: which was the full moon and the night sky kind
Speaker 3: of engorged, pale full moon set against the dark background
Speaker 3: with this eerie music playing, and here we see the
Speaker 3: title Blue Sunshine. Now, the next vignette like this that
Speaker 3: we get is where we meet Wendy Fleming played by
Speaker 3: Ann Cooper and with and she is babysitting a couple
Speaker 3: of kids. They're sitting on the seventies est of couches.
Speaker 3: It is a I think the way you describe this
Speaker 3: is a green, brown, orange, and baby blue vertical chevron
Speaker 3: pattern with one of those nobbly upholstery types used to
Speaker 3: see on these couches. I don't know what the material
Speaker 3: is called, but my family had an old couch like
Speaker 3: this when I was growing up, where like the I
Speaker 3: don't know, the thread on the upholstery is not of
Speaker 3: an even thickness, so it's all kind of nubby.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there's an Instagram account I really love called
Speaker 2: Daughter of the Seventies. It has a lot of like
Speaker 2: images of nineteen seventies decor and food and advertisements and
Speaker 2: if you dig that vibe, blue Sunshine is for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the seventies nests will not stop. We will have
Speaker 3: to observe several things as we go on. But so,
Speaker 3: Wendy is babysitting a couple of kids and they're simultaneously
Speaker 3: watching TV and reading a book about Rapunzel. So there's
Speaker 3: a kind of chaos, and the boy keeps randomly shrieking,
Speaker 3: which is bothering Wendy. She has a terrible headache. And
Speaker 3: then suddenly they notice that what's playing on TV is
Speaker 3: a campaign ad for a politician named Ed Fleming who
Speaker 3: is running for Congress, and we learn that Ed is
Speaker 3: Wendy's husband, but they are separated. They're estranged, and the
Speaker 3: kids know that Ed is her husband. They ask is
Speaker 3: he going to be president someday? She says maybe. They say,
Speaker 3: can we come to visit in the White House? And
Speaker 3: she gets a little quiet and says she doesn't think so,
Speaker 3: because she and mister Fleming are married, but they're not
Speaker 3: living together right now. And we just get the sense
Speaker 3: that Wendy is not at peace with this arrangement, like
Speaker 3: she's not happy right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these kids are a lot.
Speaker 3: So she goes on reading the Rapunzel book, and when
Speaker 3: they get to the part about Rapunzel letting down her
Speaker 3: hair so the prince can climb it to the top
Speaker 3: of the tower, the little girl on the couch reaches up,
Speaker 3: takes hold of a lock of Wendy's long, dark hair
Speaker 3: and pulls. However, the hair comes out in her hands.
Speaker 3: She says, like, look what I did. And then Wendy,
Speaker 3: with horror, examines the lock of hair that has come
Speaker 3: out of her head. She looks disturbed and afraid. Then
Speaker 3: we cut to the night again, the moon, the dark sky,
Speaker 3: the creepy music, the credits, we get a third vignette.
Speaker 3: It's a scene in a kitchen. A woman named Barbara
Speaker 3: is talking to a male friend, a next door neighbor
Speaker 3: about her husband, who is a policeman. The husband has
Speaker 3: apparently been drinking heavily their marriage is strained. The woman
Speaker 3: says that he's been having nightmares, he talks in his sleep,
Speaker 3: and his hair is falling out, and she's finding ways
Speaker 3: to blame herself. You know, am I doing something wrong?
Speaker 3: Where she says, maybe it's the stress of his job.
Speaker 3: He is a police officer. But the male friend, who
Speaker 3: I think is also supposed to be a cop, dismisses this.
Speaker 3: He says, look, you know, I'm losing a few hairs myself.
Speaker 3: You can't blame yourself. It's not your fault. And they're
Speaker 3: talking about it. But suddenly the husband is there standing
Speaker 3: in the doorway. So this is one of the first
Speaker 3: times where this scene is like tonally at odds because
Speaker 3: the content of the scene is very tense and scary
Speaker 3: and puts you on edge. But then the way the
Speaker 3: husband is dressed when he shows up is very funny.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it would have looked funny in
Speaker 3: the seventies. Probably not, but it's very nineteen seventy seven outfit.
Speaker 3: He's wearing like a thigh length black jacket pants hiked
Speaker 3: up I think past his navel, tucked in blood red
Speaker 3: polo shirt with gigantic seventies collar like the collar tips
Speaker 3: are going out almost to his shoulders. And he's just
Speaker 3: standing in the doorway staring with the sourst expression in
Speaker 3: the history of our species.
Speaker 2: And then he gets weirder.
Speaker 3: That's right, because suddenly a macaw flies into the kitchen,
Speaker 3: lands on his shoulder while he is still doing the
Speaker 3: unmovable sour puss, and then the macaw says hello, Johnny,
Speaker 3: and then it says, h bosonshine blue sunshine. What's that?
Speaker 3: But here we get another one of those Scanner's style
Speaker 3: zoom ins on Johnny's eyes and forehead, while the sharp
Speaker 3: notes from the soundtrack just start stabbing. And then we
Speaker 3: go back to the moon and the credits. And this
Speaker 3: is where I want to emphasize again, I got a
Speaker 3: hand it to the filmmakers the fashion choices and weird
Speaker 3: maccaw antics acide, the movie so far is building such
Speaker 3: an incredible atmosphere of unsafety and human malfunction. The plot
Speaker 3: hasn't even really been articulated yet. There's not a word
Speaker 3: about LSD. But these little dip ins with different characters,
Speaker 3: all showing some kind of stress and disorder mounting inside
Speaker 3: of them in intensity, they collectively add up to a
Speaker 3: feeling already bordering on panic. There is something wrong with
Speaker 3: these people. There is something wrong with the world, something
Speaker 3: wrong with us that we don't understand. And it's this feeling,
Speaker 3: it's this terror that we're at the edge of a
Speaker 3: toe loss of control.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Now next, we're actually about to meet our protagonists. So
Speaker 3: we go to a house party. It's a house party
Speaker 3: in a very seventies house, big cozy, a frame, logs
Speaker 3: roasting in the fireplace, shag carpets to infinity, very you know,
Speaker 3: wood paneling everywhere, liquor bottles all over the kitchen counter.
Speaker 3: I should have checked if there was j and B.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't know if they had Jane B.
Speaker 3: But there's like, you know, they're cool guys sitting backwards
Speaker 3: on chairs or sitting up on the back of the couch,
Speaker 3: and it's kind of like the feeling of the scene
Speaker 3: is like that orson Wells Poll mess on Commercial, but
Speaker 3: younger and hipper and more bohemian.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's an interesting vibe. And the fireplace looks
Speaker 2: looks great a little Netflix, Where is my blue Sunshine fireplace? Yes,
Speaker 2: you're wasting time on the squid game in which the
Speaker 2: fireplace is too small. I watched it last night. Fireplace
Speaker 2: is too small. Give us like a large blue Sunshine
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies fireplace.
Speaker 3: Wait this point or after all the murders take place.
Speaker 2: But I think I would prefer before the murders. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's more the vibe I want in my living room.
Speaker 2: But I'll take what I can get.
Speaker 3: Okay. So here we get to Zelman King playing our
Speaker 3: protagonist Jerry Zipkin, and he is huddled up in an
Speaker 3: intimate corner of the room talking to Deborah Winters playing
Speaker 3: the character Alicia Sweeney. They're here on a date together
Speaker 3: and they're acting very lovey dovey. It's a lot of
Speaker 3: kind of cuddling and kissing and oh I love you.
Speaker 3: By the way, here I want to note Jerry's master work,
Speaker 3: Christmas Sweater. Yes, it plays a bit against type in
Speaker 3: terms of color scheme, though it's weird. I was noticing
Speaker 3: something about the photography in the movie. I had totally
Speaker 3: different ideas of what color this sweater was depending on
Speaker 3: the scene. Like there's one scene where he's outside and
Speaker 3: it looks it looks like deep blue, like royal blue
Speaker 3: and white, and then there's another scene where it looks
Speaker 3: more kind of purple and red. So I'm not sure
Speaker 3: which is the truer color, but at least in terms
Speaker 3: of the earlier color scheme, we see the blue and
Speaker 3: white Christmas sweater. That's interesting because it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: it should be red and green, shouldn't it if it's
Speaker 3: Christmas sweater? But he can't be stopped. He's like he's
Speaker 3: a rebel in all aesthetics. And the main imagery on
Speaker 3: the Christmas sweater is prancing pairs of reindeer with enormous,
Speaker 3: almost irish elk sized antlers. So anyway, we get Zalman
Speaker 3: king here wearing this, you know, making a statement kind
Speaker 3: of copy uniform Christmas sweater, and he's having this sweet
Speaker 3: little conversation in the corner with his date Alicia, and
Speaker 3: suddenly their attention is diverted from each other by who
Speaker 3: is that over in the corner of the other corner
Speaker 3: of the room. That's Brian James morphing into Rodin.
Speaker 2: That's right, playing the character Tony, who we only see
Speaker 2: in this scene. Brian James lived nineteen forty five through
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine. Veteran character actor that I think most
Speaker 2: of you probably know best from his role as Leon
Speaker 2: and really Scott's Blade Runner. He was also the one
Speaker 2: of the generals in the Fifth Element Unforgettable Mug.
Speaker 3: This guy, Yeah, good character actor. He's the guy who
Speaker 3: you see him really flound during in the Void Comptest
Speaker 3: in Blade Letter, in this my mother, I'll tell you
Speaker 3: about my mother.
Speaker 2: That's the one in this though, Tony is either the
Speaker 2: only guy in the social group who is still taking
Speaker 2: LSD or is the guy in the social group who
Speaker 2: took way too much LSD. Yeah, it's an interesting choice. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So he starts like raising up his arms as if
Speaker 3: he's flapping his wings and making monster sounds, and then
Speaker 3: runs around the room in monster mode, and the other
Speaker 3: characters are like, hey, remember Rodan, somebody's like the artist, No,
Speaker 3: the monster. Anyway, After the Rodane attack, the friends all
Speaker 3: decide to pose for a picture. But before that they
Speaker 3: convince one of the guys at the party a dude. Now,
Speaker 3: this is confusing because they really do call this guy
Speaker 3: different name yes sometimes that I was so confused. They
Speaker 3: call him both Frankie and Franny, and they call him
Speaker 3: Frankie more often early, but then they keep calling him
Speaker 3: Franny when they refer back to him for the rest
Speaker 3: of the movie. So I think I'm gonna say Franny
Speaker 3: instead of Frankie because that name usage persists more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I believe that's how he's listed in like
Speaker 2: IMDb and all on the credits for the movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they ask him to sing a song like
Speaker 3: he used to. This guy's he's sort of a life
Speaker 3: of the party type. He's a cool guy. Again. The
Speaker 3: seventies noss of his clothing is overwhelming. He's wearing what
Speaker 3: looks like a brown vulure sport jacket over a purple
Speaker 3: and white plaid shirt with a huge black tie hanging
Speaker 3: down to the crotch of his pants, and he starts
Speaker 3: singing an old standard from the fifties called just in Time,
Speaker 3: which has some interesting lyrics. It's I don't know who
Speaker 3: originally did this song. It sounds like it could be
Speaker 3: a you know, Frank Sinatra type singer song, but I
Speaker 3: don't think it was Sinatra, but that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: And the lyrics include things like my time was running low,
Speaker 3: the losing dice were tossed, my bridges all were crossed,
Speaker 3: nowhere to go? Now you're here, and now I know
Speaker 3: just where I'm going. Yeah, going, You're going to a
Speaker 3: bad place.
Speaker 2: It's interesting the juxtaposition between Tony's acid antics and then
Speaker 2: this song. It kind of like fits into this theme
Speaker 2: you see throughout the movie where the characters are I think,
Speaker 2: to varying degrees, maybe a little embarrassed by their psychedelic
Speaker 2: experiences and sort of the culture of the sixties, and
Speaker 2: so it's almost like a gut reaction to Tony still
Speaker 2: doing his thing and being like a little embarrassing. Is like,
Speaker 2: let's do an old standard, Let's do the kind of
Speaker 2: music that our parents liked, you know. And so they
Speaker 2: start belding this fifties number, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So while Frannie is singing the song, he starts
Speaker 3: dancing with one of the women at the party, and
Speaker 3: then he goes to dip her and I think her date.
Speaker 3: This guy is not happy about this, and he reaches
Speaker 3: out and grabs Franny by the hair, which is already
Speaker 3: a weird thing to do. But suddenly, to everyone's shock,
Speaker 3: Franny's hair all comes off at once in the guy's hand,
Speaker 3: leaving Franny completely bald except for a few patches, and
Speaker 3: the tone of the scene changes in an instant. Franny
Speaker 3: suddenly looks wild and deranged. The music starts skittering with
Speaker 3: these tense violins, and Franny bolts out the front door
Speaker 3: of the house into the night.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and at first everyone's just like WHOA, that was
Speaker 2: super weird and random, right, But then like it does
Speaker 2: kick in that everybody here is friends to some degree,
Speaker 2: and they sort of decide, well, we should go look
Speaker 2: for him that dude needs help.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's mainly Jerry that decides to go
Speaker 3: look for him. People get weirded out and the party
Speaker 3: kind of breaks up in multiple directions. So, like several
Speaker 3: of the friends, including Jerry's date Alisha that's Debbor Winters,
Speaker 3: they get into a car to head into town. She's
Speaker 3: saying like, I need some honey, honey, you'll help me feel.
Speaker 2: Better, and Tony, I guess, just flies off into the night.
Speaker 2: We never see Tony again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, yeah, that's right. Where does Tony go? I
Speaker 3: don't know. He does not stay behind to become one
Speaker 3: of the murder victims, but he also maybe he goes
Speaker 3: to town. I don't know. Maybe Tony needs some honey,
Speaker 3: he needs Rodane food. But anyway, so a few more
Speaker 3: stay behind at the house and Jerry alone decides to
Speaker 3: go look around outside for Franny to make sure he's okay.
Speaker 3: He takes a flashlight goes out walking in the trees. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: back at the house, a few guests are hanging around
Speaker 3: the fire smoking cigarettes, talking about what happened. They can't
Speaker 3: figure out if it was a prank or not. Franny's
Speaker 3: the kind of guy who does pull pranks, but I
Speaker 3: don't know. It was so strange. Then there's a knock
Speaker 3: at the door. One of them goes to answer, and uh, oh,
Speaker 3: here he is again. It's Franny. Bald, pale, with a manic,
Speaker 3: crazed look in his eyes. He bursts through the threshold
Speaker 3: and commences a homicidal rampage, and it is a shocking scene.
Speaker 3: He murders the other guests of the party, one of
Speaker 3: them at least by like throwing her into the fireplace.
Speaker 3: It is horrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's horrifying. This is not the fireplace I want
Speaker 2: in my living room. Netflix.
Speaker 3: So meanwhile, Jerry's out walking in the woods and he
Speaker 3: finds Franny's hair hanging from a tree branch, and I
Speaker 3: recall it, so I have more perspective on this now.
Speaker 3: I think this is supposed to be a wig. But
Speaker 3: I remember the first time I saw the movie, I
Speaker 3: was really confused, like, is it that his real hair
Speaker 3: all fell off at once and is still in a
Speaker 3: single mass like this, or within the movie, is it
Speaker 3: supposed to be a wig with the idea that like,
Speaker 3: his hair's been falling out and he's been wearing a
Speaker 3: wig to hide it. I think it's the latter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, because this seems to be a common feature
Speaker 2: in the film, is that people are losing their hair
Speaker 2: to the Blue Sunshine syndrome. They are obtaining wig We
Speaker 2: see wigs for sale in some of the scenes late
Speaker 2: in the picture, and it almost becomes this kind of
Speaker 2: metaphor for like the mask of normal life that one
Speaker 2: imposes upon themself to despite the trauma that's going on
Speaker 2: inside you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So here Jerry hears a scream coming from the house,
Speaker 3: so he goes running back to the house and he
Speaker 3: finds the three remaining guests all murdered and they're like
Speaker 3: burning in the fireplace. Again. It's a horrible scene. So
Speaker 3: he's in shock from this and he's like sort of
Speaker 3: just wandering around, like what's going on, and suddenly Franny
Speaker 3: pops out from behind a curtain and attacks him. They
Speaker 3: begin to fight. This scuffle leads them outside outside in
Speaker 3: front of the house and then into the street, where
Speaker 3: Franny is hit by a passing truck and we do
Speaker 3: get a jump scare when the truckers like go to
Speaker 3: check on him, he like pops up again, but then
Speaker 3: falls down and dies. Jerry goes back up to the
Speaker 3: house and just kind of sits in front of front
Speaker 3: of the fireplace, and one of the truckers jumps to conclusions,
Speaker 3: gets a revolver out of his glovebox and follows Jerry
Speaker 3: up to the house, where he confronts him shoots him
Speaker 3: in the arm. It's clear the trucker thinks Jerry is
Speaker 3: responsible for all these murders, and then Jerry, in a
Speaker 3: strange acting moment, issues this grating, full volume proclamation that
Speaker 3: I didn't kill anybody, and then he escapes in his car.
Speaker 2: Not looking good. Jerry not looking good, and.
Speaker 3: Then it's clear that when the cops arrive later, they
Speaker 3: come to the same conclusion as the trucker. They're obviously
Speaker 3: as Almon King did all of this. There's a scene
Speaker 3: where a detective is interviewing Alicia outside the house. She's
Speaker 3: back here now, and she is adamant that Jerry is
Speaker 3: not responsible, but the detective is adamant that he is.
Speaker 3: Just wanted to note this movie does have I think
Speaker 3: the inspector here is Inspector Clay, just like Plann nine
Speaker 3: from Outer Space. That's to worst character.
Speaker 2: Oh man, that can't be an accident. That's got to
Speaker 2: be intentional.
Speaker 3: Then we get a scene with the cops talking to
Speaker 3: each other where they explain their theories. One of them
Speaker 3: says that Zipkin is erratic as hell. He graduated from
Speaker 3: Cornell top of his class, and now he hasn't got
Speaker 3: a pot to piss in. He must have had ten
Speaker 3: jobs for in the last five years. He quit his
Speaker 3: last one because the firm wouldn't hire enough women. And
Speaker 3: this really gets the partner's attention. And I thought he
Speaker 3: was going to say something sexist here, but instead he says,
Speaker 3: and then he barbecues three of them in a fireplace.
Speaker 3: It seems counterintuitive to the cops, and yet they are
Speaker 3: not deterred. He is their prime suspect. Anyway, Jerry's now
Speaker 3: on the run from the cops. He shows up at
Speaker 3: the hospital looking for his friend David, the doctor, very
Speaker 3: stressed out doctor who he met earlier. So he's got
Speaker 3: an obvious, bloody gunshot wound in his arm, but he
Speaker 3: he's like dabbing it and carrying this dirty, bloody rag
Speaker 3: walks into the hospital and the reception is a receptionist
Speaker 3: is like, oh, yeah, the doctor will see you his
Speaker 3: offices down the hall. Just go on in. Like what
Speaker 3: doctors work like that in the seventies or is this
Speaker 3: just movie magic?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: No, no, it's just a little more laid back, right.
Speaker 3: And I like how when David looks at the wound,
Speaker 3: the first thing he says is like, hmm, not too bad.
Speaker 3: The inflection is almost kind of like nice, good job.
Speaker 3: Jerry tries to lie and tell him he was accidentally
Speaker 3: shot by a hunter, but David is like, Jerry, I
Speaker 3: have to report all gunshot wounds. I can't, you know,
Speaker 3: just forget about this. So they have an argument because
Speaker 3: David knows that he's lying. He's hiding something. And after
Speaker 3: David leaves the room, there's a part where Jerry notices
Speaker 3: a bunch of hair on the floor. His doctor buddy
Speaker 3: seems to be shedding, and there's ominous music here. When
Speaker 3: Jerry asks about this, Bloom shrugs it off. He's just
Speaker 3: like as stress of the job. But in this conversation
Speaker 3: he casually drops a mention of past drug use. He's like,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't party like I used to. Now.
Speaker 3: There's a scene where we meet up with Windy again,
Speaker 3: who the lady who was babysitting earlier, and she's getting
Speaker 3: her hair shampooed in the sink by another lady. I
Speaker 3: was not quite sure if this is her friend or
Speaker 3: her hairstylist. I think it's a friend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wasn't sure if this was the kid's parents
Speaker 2: or what. But at any rate, it's not essential.
Speaker 3: So they're trying to figure out why her hair is
Speaker 3: falling out. The other lady speculates that it could be
Speaker 3: because Wendy isn't quote getting any This is a true
Speaker 3: health fact, she read in Cosmo. It affects your bioorrhythms,
Speaker 3: she said.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of ridiculous, but they play it well.
Speaker 2: They play it well.
Speaker 3: But Wendy confesses that she's having persistent headaches and terrible
Speaker 3: nightmares whenever she sleeps. She's frightened that something is really
Speaker 3: wrong with her. And once again the fear in this
Speaker 3: scene is palpable, and you really feel bad for Wendy,
Speaker 3: Wendy and David both. I've already said this, but I
Speaker 3: really just do want to emphasize that in a kind
Speaker 3: of an exploitation thriller movie like this, and you wouldn't
Speaker 3: necessarily expect to feel a lot of empathy, like a
Speaker 3: lot of emotional sympathy for the characters and their struggles,
Speaker 3: but in this movie, you really really do, or at
Speaker 3: least I did. Like Wendy and David, you are feeling
Speaker 3: so bad for and so worried for.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, ultimately, in this conversation Wendy's friend here she links
Speaker 3: Wendy's stress and her nightmares and everything to her separation
Speaker 3: from her husband, because again, Wendy doesn't really seem to
Speaker 3: be at peace with this situation. She hasn't recovered from it.
Speaker 3: And then there's a great cut coming up, where Wendy's like,
Speaker 3: how can I put Eddie in the past when his
Speaker 3: gorgeous face is plastered all over the city, you know,
Speaker 3: because he's running for office, so there are the posters everywhere.
Speaker 3: Then we cut straight to a campaign poster, a defaced
Speaker 3: ed fleming for Congress poster stuck up to the back
Speaker 3: of a bus station where somebody has wided out his
Speaker 3: eyes and half of his hair and drawn fangs and
Speaker 3: a snake tongue coming out of his lips so he
Speaker 3: looks like a clownish reptilian grindle. And the slogan on
Speaker 3: top of the sign is here is the Future.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about this, and I wonder if the
Speaker 3: subplot of the political campaign in this movie was all
Speaker 3: inspired by Taxi Driver, which came out the year before.
Speaker 3: I can't be sure there, but I don't know. I
Speaker 3: felt some similarities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it might be there, just sort of in
Speaker 2: terms of basic structure, different purpose, and different characters obviously,
Speaker 2: but yeah, he might be onto something there. I'm just
Speaker 2: going to add that all of this was shot in
Speaker 2: la so anytime we're outdoors in this picture, we do
Speaker 2: get these authentic scenes of nineteen seventies Los Angeles. Be
Speaker 2: it something like MacArthur Park or you know, various the
Speaker 2: Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of beautiful, notable public spaces in this movie.
Speaker 3: You see a lot of parks and pedestrian overpasses and
Speaker 3: interesting little plazas and stuff. Anyway, in this scene, we
Speaker 3: get Jerry, who is still on the run from police,
Speaker 3: meeting up with Alicia. She does believe he's innocent, but
Speaker 3: she thinks maybe he should turn himself in anyway because
Speaker 3: running makes him look guilty. And I like that, Jerry.
Speaker 3: I feel like this is not a thing that would
Speaker 3: normally make the protagonist on the run from police say
Speaker 3: but I like that. His response is I can't go
Speaker 3: to jail, even for one day. I'll go bananas. It's
Speaker 3: a different kind of response. It's like, okay, know thyself,
Speaker 3: I cannot do the time, even until I make bail.
Speaker 3: Just can't do it. I feel like the more normal
Speaker 3: protagonist there would have said like, I've got to get
Speaker 3: to the bottom of who the real killer is or something.
Speaker 3: I don't know, something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It kind of feels like
Speaker 2: one of those lines you throw in when you realize,
Speaker 2: you know, I really need to put something in here
Speaker 2: to explain why he's doing this, And you know, maybe
Speaker 2: it's a little bit throwaway, but it establishes, okay, there
Speaker 2: is a reason.
Speaker 3: So they argue about what could have made Franny act
Speaker 3: the way he did, and while they're having this conversation,
Speaker 3: they just happen to stumble across a guy reading a newspaper.
Speaker 3: The paper is a copy of the National Informer, which
Speaker 3: has this shocking photo and then the headline that says
Speaker 3: Glendale detective goes mad. It kills wife, children, neighbor, then
Speaker 3: kill self, even neighbors dog not spared. Night of terror.
Speaker 3: So we look at this and we're like, oh, wait
Speaker 3: a minute, we know who that is. That is the
Speaker 3: guy from the opening vignette who was wearing the cherry
Speaker 3: red shirt with the mild wide collar and the macaw
Speaker 3: on his shoulder, yelling blue sunshine, something terrible happened.
Speaker 2: This is hilarious because I just love the idea that
Speaker 2: this newspaper is running a photograph of a corpse. Yes,
Speaker 2: front page partially above the fold, it's mostly below the fold,
Speaker 2: but still, like, when is you ever see something this grotesque,
Speaker 2: but at the same time, maybe it does kind of
Speaker 2: work because like maybe that's blue Sunshine is theorizing like
Speaker 2: this is where the world is. You would run this
Speaker 2: on the front page of your newspaper.
Speaker 3: This is the bleak, broken world we live in.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Jerry and Alicia see the photo and they noticed
Speaker 3: that the murderer is hairless, looking exactly like Franny. They
Speaker 3: don't know this guy, but they're like, what another bald
Speaker 3: murder rampage. That's so Jerry buys a copy of the
Speaker 3: paper at a newsstand starts reading it as he like
Speaker 3: drifts away up an escalator, while Alicia yells at him
Speaker 3: not to leave her behind. She's like, I want to
Speaker 3: go on the lamb with you and help you figure
Speaker 3: this out. He ignores her and reads the story. I
Speaker 3: want to say, this is a case of there are
Speaker 3: several moments like this in the movie where I feel
Speaker 3: like Alicia is trying to be helpful and Jerry is
Speaker 3: just not. He's not being very nice.
Speaker 2: No, no, and again he's having a hard time.
Speaker 3: But still, anyway, it's obvious what the next move is.
Speaker 3: In order to prove his innocence, Jerry himself has to
Speaker 3: solve the case. He's got to figure out what's going on,
Speaker 3: that's right. Yeah, So the first stop is he wants
Speaker 3: to go to the scene of the crime reported in
Speaker 3: the paper. I guess the paper just like gives out
Speaker 3: the address where the crimes occur. So Jerry goes and
Speaker 3: he talks to the neighbor lady who's suspicious of reporters.
Speaker 3: He has to assure her he is not one. This
Speaker 3: character actress here seemed very familiar to me. I was like,
Speaker 3: I know her from something.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is Alice Ghostly, who lived nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: three through two thousand and seven. Very familiar character actress.
Speaker 2: Her film credits alone include nineteen sixty twos To Kill
Speaker 2: a Mockingbird, sixty seven's The Graduate, seventy eight's Grease, and
Speaker 2: just loads of other stuff. She was on forty eight
Speaker 2: episodes of Designing Women on TV. So, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: a very familiar face, even if you can't line it
Speaker 2: up with a particular title like you've seen her before.
Speaker 3: So she starts filling Jerry in with mostly she's just
Speaker 3: recounting a lot of the grizzly details of the crime,
Speaker 3: like explaining all of the fatal injuries, though strangely, she
Speaker 3: explains that in years past, Johnny was always so gentle
Speaker 3: and kind, he was the nicest guy. What could have
Speaker 3: changed in him? Jerry breaks into the house and one
Speaker 3: of the funny things here is that there is a
Speaker 3: framed photo of Johnny in full copy uniform by himself,
Speaker 3: sitting on the mantle. Just seems like an odd thing
Speaker 3: to have in your house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, need an establishing shot, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a oh my god. He goes up to
Speaker 3: the stairs where there is like a white tape outline
Speaker 3: of a body, you know, like in a crime scene,
Speaker 3: but it's on top of the stairs which are completely
Speaker 3: covered in orange shag carpet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty glorious.
Speaker 3: Not just carpeted stairs, orange shag carpet stairs. Go Valls.
Speaker 3: So anyway, he's like looking, Jerry's looking at the crime scene,
Speaker 3: and somehow here he like viscerally relives the crime. Strange
Speaker 3: thing is this is the closest the movie ever comes
Speaker 3: to anything that feels like a sharing of a psychedelic perspective.
Speaker 3: It's like he's hallucinating that he's there during the crime.
Speaker 3: Except we get the feeling that Jerry is not on
Speaker 3: drugs and probably never did any drugs, and so I
Speaker 3: don't know. That's kind of odd. It's almost like they're
Speaker 3: implying he's psychic. But this never comes back again in
Speaker 3: the movie.
Speaker 2: I feel like Jerry did some drugs. I don't know. Oh, okay,
Speaker 2: I mean he didn't do Blue Sunshine, but I bet
Speaker 2: I think he did a little something.
Speaker 3: Oh maybe they never talk about it. Yeah, but maybe
Speaker 3: he just has the shining. Also, there's a bird scare here.
Speaker 3: There's like, oh, here's something in the closet, and he
Speaker 3: opens it up and the McCaw flies out. But the
Speaker 3: macaw says, hello, Johnny. And then what was the other
Speaker 3: thing the bird said in the earlier scene? It says
Speaker 3: blue sunshine. M Now this rattles something in Jerry's brain.
Speaker 3: He's like, blue sunshine. Where have I heard those words before?
Speaker 3: So he goes and breaks into another dwelling. He goes
Speaker 3: to Franny's house. I think this is Franny's photo studio.
Speaker 3: And he goes and he looks around and there are
Speaker 3: pictures on the wall of Jerry and Franny and other
Speaker 3: friends of theirs. And then he comes to one photo.
Speaker 3: He's one he's seen before. And it's the one he's
Speaker 3: looking for. Why who is that in the photo? It
Speaker 3: is aspiring congressman Ed Fleming, who we've seen several times
Speaker 3: now in his campaign commercials and posters, except here he's
Speaker 3: a bit younger, and he is dressed up like some
Speaker 3: kind of new age spiritual guru with long blonde Richard
Speaker 3: Lynch hair, wearing shell beads in a kind of double
Speaker 3: exposure shot with rays of light emanating from his face.
Speaker 3: And then the title of this photo is on a
Speaker 3: label underneath. It's called Blue Sunshine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is the this is the image that
Speaker 2: implies so much about Fleming's past, and again it's it's
Speaker 2: better than a dozen flashbacks, Like yeah, your mind goes there.
Speaker 2: Just by seeing this image.
Speaker 3: The plot thickened. So time to go to a campaign event.
Speaker 3: We go to an Ed flaming campaign event where we
Speaker 3: meet several other major characters. Fleming himself, who is who
Speaker 3: is handsome, charismatic and assertive, but also we're going to
Speaker 3: get the sense that he is maybe an untrustworthy, unsavory guy.
Speaker 3: He's a guy who you know, he's he's a glad hander.
Speaker 3: He he's very charming in person, but he's probably a
Speaker 3: liar and a cheat and maybe other things.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, I think it's important to
Speaker 2: stress that Fleming doesn't come off as like sometimes you
Speaker 2: have a political character in a film like this and
Speaker 2: it's like this guy is a is a clear danger
Speaker 2: to everything. It's more like he's kind of a standard politician,
Speaker 2: like he's as bad as all the other political candidates
Speaker 2: out there. And we also get the impression, I mean,
Speaker 2: perhaps just because it's California, that like he's probably a
Speaker 2: progressive candidate. You know, they never say for sure, but
Speaker 2: you know, you get the impression. It's like this guy
Speaker 2: like on paper, he's probably not that bad, but like
Speaker 2: he is part of the political machine.
Speaker 3: He doesn't come off as frighteningly power hungry, like like
Speaker 3: Greg Stillson in the Dead Zone or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just thinking of the Dead Zone. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Instead, it's more just kind of like he's a maybe untrustworthy,
Speaker 3: narcissistic guy who's slightly ambitious and is advancing to a
Speaker 3: political career.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But it's interesting because we already have that Juxapa
Speaker 2: is with that photograph, so we know who he used
Speaker 2: to be and maybe who he used to be isn't
Speaker 2: that far removed from who he is now? You know,
Speaker 2: selling a dream, selling an idea and is there anything
Speaker 2: at the heart of it now?
Speaker 3: We also in the scene meet Wayne Mulligan, who is
Speaker 3: Fleming's bodyguard on the campaign, a former college football player
Speaker 3: who decided he like walks up to Alicia here at
Speaker 3: the campaign scene and I think he's trying to like
Speaker 3: get a date here, and he's like, hey, I used
Speaker 3: to play football. He's huge and imposing. You look at
Speaker 3: this guy and you think, wow, be really bad if
Speaker 3: he like lost his marbles and started running around punching people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Jerry gets a minute aside to talk to Fleming.
Speaker 3: He comes to the campaign trailer and asks to meet him,
Speaker 3: and Fleming does meet him. He asks him whether he
Speaker 3: knew Franny, and Fleming says he did, yeah, years ago.
Speaker 3: They went to college together. They were both at Stanford
Speaker 3: at the same time. And Jerry informs Fleming of Franny's death.
Speaker 3: And this conversation is interrupted by the way by one
Speaker 3: of the staffers yelling like, mister Fleming, I have the
Speaker 3: puppet people on the phone. This will make more sense
Speaker 3: later because there is a campaign event that includes a
Speaker 3: Puppet Show. Yeah, okay, but at the moment, I'm like,
Speaker 3: what is the puppet people? Are we in, mister big territory?
Speaker 3: Here is this attacking the puppet people? Yeah, like the
Speaker 3: puppet people in that movie get control of a telephone
Speaker 3: and they're like, we gotta call Ed Fleming. He can
Speaker 3: help us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, likely we do get some payoff on this
Speaker 2: later on.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Anyway, in this conversation, Jerry asks Fleming if he
Speaker 3: has ever heard the words blue sunshine, and Fleming denies it,
Speaker 3: but he is obviously lying. What is he hiding? Anyway,
Speaker 3: Mulligan comes in to break up the conversation, and suddenly
Speaker 3: Jerry has to flee because Alicia's police tale is here.
Speaker 3: She's being followed by police everywhere she goes. They spot
Speaker 3: Jerry and it turns into a car chase. Jerry gets
Speaker 3: away in this car chase because he has a vehicle
Speaker 3: with four wheel drive and the cops don't. He like
Speaker 3: goes up a hillside yep. Anyway, Jerry and Alicia meet
Speaker 3: up later to compare notes, and Alicia has learned some stuff.
Speaker 3: She learned stuff from Mulligan. When they were talking. She
Speaker 3: found out that Franny Fleming and the red shirt guy
Speaker 3: who did the horrible crime. They all graduated from Stanford
Speaker 3: together ten years ago at the same time. And then
Speaker 3: Jerry realizes his doctor friend David also graduated from Stanford
Speaker 3: ten years ago and his hair has been falling out too,
Speaker 3: and oh boy. Here we cut to a very suspenseful
Speaker 3: scene where David is like in the operating room getting
Speaker 3: ready for surgery, and we're all like, oh no, oh no,
Speaker 3: we know what's coming next. But it's a bit of
Speaker 3: a fake out because he gets through that. He does
Speaker 3: have like a tense moment in the surgery where he's
Speaker 3: like yelling at his subordinates to get him instruments and stuff,
Speaker 3: but it does not turn into it does not go
Speaker 3: where you think it's going, right, So after this, Jerry
Speaker 3: has a confrontation with David where Jerry tries to yank
Speaker 3: David's hair out. This is a strange scene, but it
Speaker 3: stays on and Jerry explains his theory to his friend.
Speaker 3: He's trying to make sense of all this, but he's like, hey,
Speaker 3: you went to Stanford with these three guys, and David
Speaker 3: fills in some more information. He's like, yeah, we did
Speaker 3: all go to college together. When we were there Ed Fleming,
Speaker 3: who's now running for Congress. He was a drug dealer.
Speaker 3: He was everybody's connection for all things narcotic and psychedelic.
Speaker 3: And David stresses, He's like, I don't want to get
Speaker 3: Fleming in trouble. I don't want this coming out about
Speaker 3: him because it could ruin his political career. And I
Speaker 3: was just thinking, man, any movie about politics from more
Speaker 3: than I don't know, eight years ago feels so quaint
Speaker 3: now because they're all like, wow, if we found out
Speaker 3: something that reflected poorly on this politician's character, they could
Speaker 3: never be elected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for real. But it makes sense here. It's
Speaker 2: like he says he's donated to the campaign. He's still
Speaker 2: to some degree, you know, connected to this guy. There
Speaker 2: were friends at one point, so you know he's not
Speaker 2: looking to stir up some trouble.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And once again, the movie does not signal anything
Speaker 3: unusual about Fleming's political agenda. He just seems like a
Speaker 3: regular politician. They also don't make it clear like what
Speaker 3: his you know, like left right orientation is, or what
Speaker 3: party he's with. He's just sort of like politician.
Speaker 2: But he we do get the idea that he is
Speaker 2: he is selling the dream, you know, we see that
Speaker 2: on the campaign posters. He is selling the future.
Speaker 3: Anyway, After a lot of hmming and hauling in this conversation,
Speaker 3: David does come around. He's like, wait a minute, yes,
Speaker 3: I have heard of Blue Sunshine. That was the name
Speaker 3: of a particular batch of acid that Fleming was selling
Speaker 3: ten years ago. And there's a scary moment where David
Speaker 3: reveals he bought some, but then he's like, I never
Speaker 3: took it, so he bought some. He got scared because
Speaker 3: he's like, he ultimately decided they were making this in
Speaker 3: chemistry labs. You never knew what was in it. You
Speaker 3: might have gotten a bad batch. He might have gotten
Speaker 3: one that wasn't what it was supposed to be, so
Speaker 3: instead of taking it, he sold it to somebody else.
Speaker 3: He got rid of it. And Jerry asks him, He's like, okay,
Speaker 3: in your opinion as a doctor, could it be that
Speaker 3: there was something different about this batch, something wrong with
Speaker 3: it that would become like a time bomb in your body,
Speaker 3: causing you to lose all of your hair and then
Speaker 3: turn into a homicidal madman. Exactly ten years later, David
Speaker 3: says it's unlikely, but not impossible. Therefore, by movie logic,
Speaker 3: it is proven. Yes, but how could Jerry prove this
Speaker 3: to the police. Well, David says, you know, you would
Speaker 3: need to get a blood sample from one of the
Speaker 3: effective affected individuals while they're still alive to show the
Speaker 3: quote chromosomal damage. This is very like, Okay, we're coming
Speaker 3: to a lot of conclusions very fast. But they scheme together.
Speaker 3: They're like, Okay, if one of these Blue Sunshine time
Speaker 3: bombs is on a rampage, he will have super strength,
Speaker 3: so you'll need a powerful tranquilizer to sedate him and
Speaker 3: then the blood samp can be taken. So now you've
Speaker 3: got a plan. So next scene, we have another Fleming
Speaker 3: campaign event. Both Jerry and Alicia meet there and we
Speaker 3: meet Wayne Mulligan again. Remember that's Fleming's huge OAF bodyguard,
Speaker 3: and he sees Alicia across the crowd and follows her.
Speaker 3: She's like, oh, yeah, I'm just out window shopping and
Speaker 3: he goes, oh, you like shopping, Well, let me buy
Speaker 3: you whatever you want with my campaign expense account. We
Speaker 3: get some sense there's some corruption in the campaign here,
Speaker 3: but he keeps trying to hit on her, and they're
Speaker 3: like standing on the sidewalk, and as they're talking, a
Speaker 3: large truck whizzes by and honks its horn, and this
Speaker 3: freaks Mulligan out. First, the gust of wind from the
Speaker 3: truck rises up, and Mulligan grabs hold of his hair,
Speaker 3: almost as if he doesn't want it to blow away.
Speaker 3: Uh oh, and then he yells at the truck as
Speaker 3: though the sound of the horn were inflicting pain upon him. Anyway,
Speaker 3: after this outburst, he invites Alicia to their next campaign
Speaker 3: event because that's going to be the following night at
Speaker 3: quote Shoppers World. Shoppers World is a mall. Oh yeah, baby,
Speaker 3: We're going to a nineteen seventy seven mall. And it
Speaker 3: gets better because Mulligan says there's a disco tech at
Speaker 3: the mall called Big Daddy's Meet Me at the Bar. Also,
Speaker 3: did I mention in the scene Alicia is wearing a
Speaker 3: black cowboy hat and a red turtle deck.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, she looks fabulous. Yeah, but but yeah, I
Speaker 2: love that. This also sets our trajectory. This movie is
Speaker 2: going to end in a disco tech and a shopping
Speaker 2: mall almost like and I'm not a disco hater. I
Speaker 2: love some disco, but.
Speaker 3: This movie might be disco hate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this might be some disco hate, like presenting
Speaker 2: the idea that like, like American culture dies in the
Speaker 2: disco and in the shopping mall, you know, like this
Speaker 2: is the this is the perfect place for Blue Sunshine
Speaker 2: to reach its conclusion.
Speaker 3: Okay, next scene, we're back with poor Wendy Fleming and
Speaker 3: the kids she's babysitting. They're watching cartoons on TV, and
Speaker 3: Wendy's in the kitchen, and oh boy, one of my
Speaker 3: favorite things in the movies, we get a peek inside
Speaker 3: the cabinet to see some bona fide nineteen seventy seven food.
Speaker 3: I see some Quaker oats, I think some kidney beans,
Speaker 3: Campbell's canned soup. You can't quite read the label, but
Speaker 3: let's just say it's cream of celery or maybe split
Speaker 3: pea with ham. But then finally, what we definitely see
Speaker 3: is a can of Hormel canned to Molly's.
Speaker 2: I think I remember this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, also a vial of pills stored in the same
Speaker 3: cabinet as the food, which also seems very seventy seven. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the mother of the two kids is hanging out
Speaker 3: at first, and she's like about to leave them there
Speaker 3: with Wendy and go back home for a bit when
Speaker 3: Jerry Zipken knocks at the door, So the other lady
Speaker 3: looks out the peep hole and she sees him and
Speaker 3: she's like, hmm, not bad, what a hunk. So they
Speaker 3: let Jerry in, you know, she goes off. He introduces
Speaker 3: himself as a friend of Eddie, and Jerry and Wendy
Speaker 3: exchanged some niceties, but eventually, once they're out of ear
Speaker 3: shot of the kids, he gets to the point he says,
Speaker 3: did you ever hear of Blue Sunshine? And she plays coy,
Speaker 3: pretends she doesn't know. She's like, are you trying to
Speaker 3: score from Eddie? Almost implying that he still deals drugs,
Speaker 3: But she gets very defensive of her estranged husband, accusing
Speaker 3: Jerry of trying to damage his political career. Jerry's like,
Speaker 3: I don't care about that. That's not what it is.
Speaker 3: I'm just trying to find out everybody who may have
Speaker 3: received this batch of acid, and she gets very upset
Speaker 3: and kicks Jerry out of her apartment. But uh oh.
Speaker 3: After Jerry leaves, Wendy is very stressed out. She's breathing heavily.
Speaker 3: The kids start chanting that the kids are chanting we
Speaker 3: want ice cream, we want ice cream, and then screaming
Speaker 3: we want hot dogs, we want hot dogs. I think
Speaker 3: we can all see where this is going. Wendy starts
Speaker 3: to have a blue sunshine freak out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is a terrifying sequence. This apelds up.
Speaker 3: The level of menace is off the charts. She starts
Speaker 3: like frantically chewing up all her pills. Then her eyes
Speaker 3: roll back in her head of thing at the mouth.
Speaker 3: Then she pulls her wig off to reveal a totally
Speaker 3: bald head, so creepy, and then she looks at the
Speaker 3: kitchen knives and this is so it's horrible. She's here
Speaker 3: with the kids. But just as Jerry is leaving the building,
Speaker 3: something doesn't quite feel right to him, and he decides
Speaker 3: to go back. And then there's a kind of this
Speaker 3: is against tone because this scene in the apartment above
Speaker 3: is so creepy and awful. But then, like Jerry is,
Speaker 3: it's taking too long for him to get back up
Speaker 3: there because they are like older people taking forever in
Speaker 3: the elevator. Yes, and so we're intercutting between that funny
Speaker 3: thing and the elevator with bald windy like walking up
Speaker 3: behind the kids with a knife. This movie absolutely does
Speaker 3: not pass the Gene Siskel test. It has scenes of
Speaker 3: a maniac chasing little children around with a knife. Of course,
Speaker 3: you know, Ciskel didn't like any movie where kids were
Speaker 3: shown in peril. This is some explicit horrifying children in peril.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the way they play it, too, is so believable,
Speaker 2: because it's like the kids don't understand what's happening. They
Speaker 2: think it is a game, and then they're getting a
Speaker 2: little upset about the game, and yeah, it's rough.
Speaker 3: Fortunately the children are unharmed. Jerry gets back bursts in
Speaker 3: in time to stop her, and then Jerry and Wendy
Speaker 3: wrestle for the knife until finally Wendy is thrown from
Speaker 3: the park apartment balcony. In the struggle, she falls to
Speaker 3: her death, leaving Jerry standing there holding a bloody knife.
Speaker 3: And then by the time people get there, it just
Speaker 3: looks like Jerry has murdered again. Jerry is really bad
Speaker 3: about doing things that make him look guilty when he
Speaker 3: is not a murderer. Like the neighbor comes in and
Speaker 3: sees him and starts screaming, and his reaction is not
Speaker 3: like no, no, you don't understand. Instead, he runs up
Speaker 3: to her and puts a bloody hand over her mouth
Speaker 3: and yells at her to be quiet.
Speaker 2: I also have to throw in this sequence where Wendy
Speaker 2: goes out the window and falls to her death. Very
Speaker 2: well executed. We've all seen films where someone falls from
Speaker 2: a height and it's not believable. This is very well
Speaker 2: done and is quite believable. Nobody's chunking a mannequin out
Speaker 2: of a window for this sequence.
Speaker 3: Okay. We get a few more scenes where just some
Speaker 3: information is shared between characters. Fleming finds out about the
Speaker 3: death of his wife, and he finds out from the
Speaker 3: police that they think Jerry Zipken is responsible for the murder.
Speaker 3: We get a scene of Jerry meeting again with David.
Speaker 3: They meet in the park where Jerry is getting the
Speaker 3: tranquilizers that he's going to use, but David is dressed
Speaker 3: up like a drug dealer. He's wearing like shades in
Speaker 3: a long coat. I think there's supposed to be some
Speaker 3: irony here. And in the scene, David mentions another guy
Speaker 3: he remembered taking the Blue Sunshine, a football player named
Speaker 3: Wayne Mulligan. All he wanted was acid, acid, acid.
Speaker 2: Oh man, he didn't even care if it was blue
Speaker 2: or not.
Speaker 3: Also another random scene of Jerry being mean for no reason.
Speaker 3: He steals money from a guy with drug addiction for
Speaker 3: no particular reason.
Speaker 2: Is this the guy who's like coming up in close
Speaker 2: talking to him on the bench.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the guys like I need you to go over
Speaker 3: there and buy some for me. Takes his money and
Speaker 3: then he just leaves.
Speaker 2: There is a really creepy bald guy who comes up
Speaker 2: and stares at him in this scene. And it's fun
Speaker 2: detail is that Jeff Lieberman says that they were filming
Speaker 2: and this dude just walked up and they were like,
Speaker 2: get a release in that dude's hands. We got to
Speaker 2: get him to sign a release. We've got to have
Speaker 2: him in the picture. But this is just a guy
Speaker 2: who wandered up.
Speaker 3: Also a scene around here where Alicia is talking to
Speaker 3: the detective who's been following her and she's like, look,
Speaker 3: Jerry's innocent and I can prove it. She comes up
Speaker 3: with the scheme. All we got to do is get
Speaker 3: this guy Wayne Mulligan and have him tested. Have him test.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I have him tested for Blue Sunshine. But
Speaker 3: there's also a scene there's like a gun store scene
Speaker 3: of Jerry buying a hand pumped pellet gun to shoot
Speaker 3: the Tranquilizer dart, and I thought this scene is interesting
Speaker 3: because Jerry learns a litany to defeat the villain. It's
Speaker 3: like he's practicing a magic spell that has rhyming lines.
Speaker 3: The last line is about how to operate the pellet
Speaker 3: gun with the darts, but the last line of the
Speaker 3: litany is because if you jerk, it won't work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a full mantra that he learns here from
Speaker 2: the dude at the gun store, and it's very effect.
Speaker 2: It's kind of ridiculous in its own way, which I
Speaker 2: think you're about to touch on, but you know, I
Speaker 2: don't know. You get a feel for the weapon that
Speaker 2: is clearly going to be pivotal in the finale of
Speaker 2: the picture, and and we have this weird, almost you know,
Speaker 2: semi magical litany that he's going to recite. So I
Speaker 2: dig it.
Speaker 3: So as a story element, it really works. But there
Speaker 3: are also ridiculous things about this scene, like the gun
Speaker 3: store has a practice range inside the store where there's
Speaker 3: a target on the wall that they're shooting at, but
Speaker 3: it's just the target is just down the middle of
Speaker 3: the store from where they are, like where customers are browsing.
Speaker 3: There's like he like raises his gun to aim at
Speaker 3: the target. There's just some cop shopping in the store
Speaker 3: leans in front of the target. What.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is not a good gun layout, gun storm layer.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know what good gun store layout is,
Speaker 2: but it's not this. Also, this sequence always makes this
Speaker 2: Noggs makes me think of terminator. You know just what
Speaker 2: you see here pel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, a phase plasma rifle with forty watt range.
Speaker 3: They do not have it. It's just dark gun here. Okay,
Speaker 3: but we're headed up to the climax. So we had
Speaker 3: two shoppers World for the campaign event. Slash Disco Tech,
Speaker 3: Acid freak Out. Fleming and Mulligan are going to be
Speaker 3: there for the campaign event, or Mulligan's going to be there,
Speaker 3: I guess to go on a date with Alisha. Jerry's
Speaker 3: going to be there with his tranquilizer gun. Alicia will
Speaker 3: be there to entrap Mulligan so he can be caught
Speaker 3: at the cops and then quote tested on Alisha's say. So, well,
Speaker 3: why the cops are going along with this, I don't know,
Speaker 3: But she's convinced them, so good job, Alisha. Also puppets.
Speaker 3: Here we get to the puppets. What is the deal
Speaker 3: with this puppet show co headlining with the fleming campaign event?
Speaker 3: It makes me think of in Spinal Tap though, when
Speaker 3: the puppet show gets top billing over Spinal Tap at
Speaker 3: the at the carnival.
Speaker 2: I guess they just wanted something that's, you know, non political.
Speaker 2: He was he stressed that earlier. It's like they can't
Speaker 2: do political material, just some sort of feel good, feel
Speaker 2: good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the puppets are singing that song just in
Speaker 3: time that Fran was singing earlier. We also get some
Speaker 3: pre rampage taste of the disco tech. Everybody's dancing, there's
Speaker 3: there are you know, of course you're flashing disco lights,
Speaker 3: but the color tone of the disco tech is very red.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I just I wanted to be there. It's like
Speaker 2: I kept thinking, like if I walked up to that bar,
Speaker 2: what kind of just horrible drink could I order? You
Speaker 2: know what, what crappy nineteen seventies cocktail could I order
Speaker 2: and just absolutely love it? Because of the.
Speaker 3: Setting, Yeah, you might think there would be some tiki
Speaker 3: drinks here but instead she goes up and orders a
Speaker 3: martini with two olives. Sidebar on martinis and movies, you know,
Speaker 3: every time somebody orders a martini in a movie, unless
Speaker 3: it's like the James Bond order, they order a dry martini,
Speaker 3: It's like, what, where's the appreciation for a nice wet
Speaker 3: martini in the movie?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I don't know. I guess maybe it just photographs better,
Speaker 2: you tell the visual difference. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 2: maybe to fill it with water and olives and you're
Speaker 2: good to go anyway.
Speaker 3: Mulligan's here, but he looks like he's not doing so good.
Speaker 3: He is sweating, skittish. He starts yelling at the music
Speaker 3: for being too loud. So it seems like you're not
Speaker 3: getting off on the right foot for this date, Wayne,
Speaker 3: and then he tells Alicia that he's going to the
Speaker 3: men's room to freshen up. So meanwhile, Jerry arrives at
Speaker 3: the mall and we see him like loading up his
Speaker 3: trank darts in the parking lot. And at the disco,
Speaker 3: the police lieutenant arrives and meets with Alicia. She has
Speaker 3: apparently gotten somewhat drunk by this time. This is another
Speaker 3: one of these things where I feel like she's acting
Speaker 3: a bit more like this is a comedy. Yeah, Like
Speaker 3: she's had several drinks by the time the police arrive,
Speaker 3: and she's like she tells him that Mulligan's been in
Speaker 3: the bathroom for a long time, Like I don't know
Speaker 3: what he's doing in there, but like, why is she
Speaker 3: having any drinks when the gold there's a mission?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're on a mission here. The mission was it
Speaker 2: to have three cocktails?
Speaker 3: Yes, So we go inside the bathroom with the police,
Speaker 3: go in there and Mulligan is having an episode a
Speaker 3: blue Sunshine attack is imminent. They try to interrogate Mulligan,
Speaker 3: but suddenly his wig comes off, and this is apparently
Speaker 3: the trigger. He like slams the cop against the bathroom
Speaker 3: stall and knocks him out, and then runs out of
Speaker 3: the bathroom and just goes on a rampage inside the disco.
Speaker 3: So a big chunk of what's left in the movie
Speaker 3: is just Mulligan rampaging in the disco.
Speaker 2: At one point he gorilla presses a girl and throws
Speaker 2: her across the dance floor.
Speaker 3: Yes, he's running around just beating everybody up. And they're
Speaker 3: probably the most famous line from the movie is like
Speaker 3: Jerry sees all these people running out of the disco
Speaker 3: while he's in the mall, and he's like, what's going on?
Speaker 3: And this man turns to Jerry and says, there's a
Speaker 3: bald maniac in there and he's going batch. Gerry runs
Speaker 3: in to rescue Alicia from the disco where she's At
Speaker 3: one point, she gets trapped inside the DJ's box, so
Speaker 3: like she's in this glass box with all of the
Speaker 3: music equipment, and Mulligan is outside, like beating on the
Speaker 3: windows trying to get to her. But she outsmarts him
Speaker 3: because she realizes she can turn the music all the
Speaker 3: way up to like drive him, you know, to like
Speaker 3: drive him away. So she kind of outsmarts him there.
Speaker 3: He runs away out of the disco, and then Jerry
Speaker 3: has to chase him with the darts. And so the
Speaker 3: final showdown is kind of a cat and mouse game
Speaker 3: inside a department store, and we get this scene where
Speaker 3: Zipken knows Mulligan is approaching him. He recites the litany
Speaker 3: of the pellet gun. He's like, squeeze, don't jerk. If
Speaker 3: you jerk, it won't work, almost like the magic spell
Speaker 3: to defeat the Warlock. And then as Mulligan looms boom
Speaker 3: dart to the neck, he nails it and we cut
Speaker 3: to epilogue text.
Speaker 2: Oh man, well we sort of it's really beautiful. I thought,
Speaker 2: like we have fire. Like he's downed the giant. He's
Speaker 2: down the maniac Mulligan. Here, he's sitting next to him,
Speaker 2: dark gun in hand, and we begin to pan back
Speaker 2: right and we begin to see more details of the
Speaker 2: shopping mall, and we hear Fleming's campaign speech and he's
Speaker 2: talking about making America good again, and he's throwing out
Speaker 2: all these lines about the future, selling the future to everyone,
Speaker 2: and it's like it's really haunting. And then we get
Speaker 2: the epilogue text, which I would argue is maybe what
Speaker 2: wasn't completely necessary. I feel like we already had a
Speaker 2: really firm landing here, but they lean in just a
Speaker 2: little bit more into the drugs politation element. Right as
Speaker 2: we close out.
Speaker 3: The epilogue text feels more like the movie poster. It
Speaker 3: says Wayne Mulligan was tested. Remember they were going to
Speaker 3: test him. He was tested and found to have extensive
Speaker 3: chromosomic aberrations and is confined at Alhambra State Sanitarium. A
Speaker 3: special task force. The United States Federal Drug Administration reports
Speaker 3: that two hundred and fifty five doses of Blue Sunshine
Speaker 3: manufactured in September nineteen sixty seven are still unaccounted for.
Speaker 3: And they ended the sentence with a preposition, well.
Speaker 2: Have to. I'm glad they didn't go full animal House
Speaker 2: on the epilogue here and tell you what every character did,
Speaker 2: because I love the ambiguity, Like, we don't know what
Speaker 2: happens with Fleming. Was the campaign successful? You know? What
Speaker 2: does he go on to do? We don't know how
Speaker 2: it shakes out with other people who took Blue Sunshine.
Speaker 2: So I think the epilogue was unnecessary. But what they
Speaker 2: added here is still creepy in its own right.
Speaker 3: Fleming comes to power on a campaign promise of blue
Speaker 3: Sunshine for every spine in America.
Speaker 2: Yeah like that, that would be too much, But yeah,
Speaker 2: I like the ambiguity of it, though. I like where
Speaker 2: we landed.
Speaker 3: So that's Blue Sunshine. If you've got a stomach for
Speaker 3: exploitation horror, I think it's a really really fine example.
Speaker 3: And again, once again want to emphasize what I said
Speaker 3: earlier works on multiple levels. It is both super effective
Speaker 3: as horror, incredibly creepy and paranoid and also one of
Speaker 3: the funniest movies I've watched in a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and with I think some very strong social commentary
Speaker 2: that stands the test of time. So strong recommendation for
Speaker 2: this one. If this is your your deal at all,
Speaker 2: and if you're looking for an off kilter Christmas movie,
Speaker 2: here you have it. Merry Christmas, Blue Sunshine. I need
Speaker 2: a Blue Sunshine ornament now, but I'll have to look
Speaker 2: end of that.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to think what the ornament would.
Speaker 2: Be bald ahead of course. Oh yeah, it's gotta be windy.
Speaker 3: I wonder if you can just get a copy of
Speaker 3: Jerry's Christmas sweater from Blue Sunshine. That'd be a deep cut.
Speaker 2: That'd be a deep cut. A VHS box art would
Speaker 2: also be really cool. I have a little VHS box
Speaker 2: art ornament of chopping mall on the tree. I also
Speaker 2: have a phantasm sphere, which you gave me last year.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's it's it's heavy and it's sharp. I think
Speaker 2: this is all made by Mondo.
Speaker 3: Oh I didn't mean for it to be threatening in
Speaker 3: your home, but yeah.
Speaker 2: It's it's we're all safe around sharbarbicks now, so we're good,
Speaker 2: but all.
Speaker 3: Is impacted baby.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, We're gonna go and close out this episode.
Speaker 2: This one of them, maybe a bit of a long one,
Speaker 2: but you know, we had to go into all the
Speaker 2: details here. It's Blue Sunshine after all. We'll remind you
Speaker 2: that The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
Speaker 2: science and culture podcast, with core episodes in the feed
Speaker 2: on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Wednesdays we do a
Speaker 2: short form episode and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2: That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 2: talk about a strange film like this one. And if
Speaker 2: you want a full list of the movies we've covered
Speaker 2: over the years, go to letterbox dot com. You'll find
Speaker 2: us there as weird House. That's our user and we
Speaker 2: have a list there of all the films we've covered
Speaker 2: so far, and sometimes sometimes there's a glimpse at what's
Speaker 2: coming up next.
Speaker 3: Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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