Trip Out on Synapse’s Limited Edition “Blue Sunshine”

A party between friends turns deadly when one of them goes into a violent frenzy after being reveled his loss of all his hair.  Blamed for the murders, floating through life Jerry Zipkin is evading police investigators while also trying to connect the pieces on why a good friend of his would suddenly turn into a madman with no body hair and with five times the strength of any ordinary man.  His own investigation leads him to Blue Sunshine, an LSD variant connected to every transgressive event similar to the party, and at the center of it all is congressional frontrunner Edward Flemming who peddled Blue Sunshine 10 years ago at Stanford.  The latent consequence is now slowly surfacing to a head and more people are starting to experience the aggressive, alopecia effects, all Zipkin has to do to prove his innocent and a major ticking timebomb is to take a sample from a living specimen to show aberrant chromosome damage caused by the designer drug. 

Before becoming outed and investigated that the U.S. government experimented LSD on human subjects and it’s unknown but possible dormant side effects of years later, writer-director Jeff Lieberman put theory into sensationalized practicality with his post-psychedelic horror “Blue Sunshine” that turned ordinary, friendly people into headache-induced phonophobia sufferers and hairless, homicidal maniacs with super strength.  Lieberman’s 1977 released film snugs in between his killer Earthworm creature feature “Squirm” and one of the better backwoods slashers titled “Just Before Dawn,” tackling with themes of adverse effects from manmade drugs, political corruption, and to never judge a book by its cover.  The film is produced by “Squirm’s” George Manasse with “He Knows Your Alone” and “The Clairvoyant” producers Edgar Lansbury and Joseph Beruh serving as executive producers on the Ellanby Films production.

While the plot point that pushes Jerry Zipkin in the direction of investigation of the sudden fury and death surrounding his friend treads a threadbare rope with little background to suggest Zipkin is characteristically dedicated, loyal, curious, or all of the above to find out what happened, Zalman King’s overall performance as the path unaffixed Zipkin overshadows those missing background pieces and motivations.  In more key precise terms, Lieberman’s misdirection toward King’s erratic and strange behavior puts a lot of the focus on Zipkin rather than obvious derangement of the latent LSD maniacs with corrupted chromosomes in what was meant to puzzle the audiences in believing Zipkin himself might be the loose cannon cause behind the murders or, even perhaps, another ignorant victim of blue sunshine, which the latter would have been more intriguing and powerfully motivating for the Zipkin character as what drives him to solve the mystery and save himself.  None of the relationship resolve any type of secure or genuine interactions, specifically with Alicia Sweeney (Deborah Winters, “Tarantulas:  The Deadly Cargo”) with an unrealistic strong undying love for Zipkin despite only knowing him for a couple of months and the entire Stanford contingent from a decade earlier who Zipkin was able to easily link together within a matter of seconds of either examining a bloody crime scene or meeting a pair of the blue sunshine fiends.  One of the better, solid bonds is between the will-do-what-it-takes congress candidate Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard, Lost in Space) and his towering former college football buddy Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young, “Blood of Dracula’s Castle”) who becomes Flemming’s 6’6” advisor and bodyguard.  While might not seem like a well-rounded bond, Flemming and Mulligan have something tangible one can grab and understand when compared to other dynamic relationships that float in arbitrary.   Robert Walden (“Rage”), Charles Siebert (“Tarantulas:  The Deadly Cargo”), Ann Cooper, and Stefan Gierasch (“Carrie”) costar. 

“Blue Sunshine’s” premise has long stood the test of time because its more relatable now than ever as scientists and medical experts are in a fluid state of studying the effects of drugs digested, snorted, injected, or smoked weeks, months, years, and decades ago.  This premise also translates over to contaminants that cause sicknesses, such as the link between asbestos and cancer were tumors form years after exposure.  Lieberman catches wind early of the dangerous latent effects and manipulates it for the basis his film that is more fact than fiction.  Lieberman’s ability to minimize assurances on who is transfiguring into a killer is all in his characterizing nuances, shading in gray areas with excellently crafted character profile vignettes in between the opening credits that instill suspicion, fear, and some unknown stemmed danger ahead.  The unique setup is the filmmaker’s only real unconventional course in the narrative that plays out mostly a routine hand in a natural style albeit the surrealism of extreme closeups and angles on bald headed balefulness when the rage takes over or the slow, insidious madness that seeps into Zipkin’s mind causing hallucinations to exact an audience experiencing disturbance in the envisaged air.  Engaging and self-security eviscerating, “Blue Sunshine” is carbonated madness in a bottle, shook up and ready to pop. 

Synapse continues to upgrade their catalogue with Blue Sunshine next on the augmentation block with a new and mighty 3-disc Blu-ray and 4K UHD restoration release.  Presented in Dolby Vision HDR10, the restoration of the original 35mm camera negative sees it’s 4K transfer compressed with a HEVC codec that produces 2160p and is stored onto a BD100 while the Blu-ray is a compressed AVC, 1080p resolution, on a BD50.  The restoration will blow you away with diffused color palette and organic details that by far are the best they’ve ever looked with a balanced, natural grain level that keeps the speckling down in darker portions of the film to retain inkiness while securing the authenticity of the film stock without any smoothing over and artificial enhancements.  Vivid coloring, immersive details, and natural skin tones, when not softly grayed by the drug’s effects, throughout are appreciatively stable with no qualitative loss between cuts, creating a pleasurable and seamless visual experience on both formats.  Each format comes with two English audio options, a lossless DTS-HD master audio 5.1 surround sound, supervised and approved by director Jeff Lieberman, and a lossless DTS-HD master audio original theatrical mono 2.0.  While the amplification of the same sound output through the dual channels is inviting for purist, I highly recommend the immersive 5.1 surround sound that retains the genuine article of audio fidelity.   Charlie Gross’s orchestral strings instruments, percussive gongs, and synthesizing score fully engrosses the characters and audiences alike into a fold of unnerving, lingering tingles that evoke the monstrous maniac effect possibilities beyond the Jerry Zipkin tale.  Dialogue renders over with fine precision that hangs on every word and sentence with no hissing and crackling to obstruct it’s sweeping clarity.  A bountiful amount of Mind-Altering special features that fill this limited to 4000 copies set that include a new feature prologue introduction with director Jeff Lieberman.  There are two audio commentaries, an archived 2003 interview with Lieberman, a Channel Z Fantasy Film Festival ”Lieberman on Lieberman” interview with the director hosted by “Sleepwalkers” Mick Garris, a Q&A video from the Fantasia Film Festival 4K premiere moderated by Michael Gingold and Lieberman, an anti-drug scare-film “LSD-25” from 1967 and “LSD:  Insight or Insanity?” From 1968 from the American Genre Film Archive, Jeff Leiberman’s first film “The Ringer” with two cuts of the film, the original uncut version from the projection print source and the final release from the remastered Synapse Films 4K transfer with audio commentary included on the uncut version by Jeff Leiberman and moderator Howard S. Berger, still gallery and theatrical trailers. Synapse’s limited-edition boxset is nothing you’ve ever seen before from the company with not only a rigid slipbox case but there’s also a cardboard O-slipcover, both housing the clear, inch-thick Blu-ray Amaray case and both showcasing new illustrative, compositional, air brushed artwork of some of the key character scenes and expressions by Wes Benscoter, which is a real thing of beauty. The Amaray cover art is the regular 70’s grade cover art seen on previous releases from DVD to Blu-ray with a reverse side an image of the tripped-out Ed Flemming icon photo of his drug peddling days at Stanford. Overlapping 4K and Blu-ray discs display graphic presses in story moment compositions, though I don’t recall a half-naked woman in the film yet is on the cover. Not quite yet done with the bonus material, the 3rd disc is a 13-track Soundtrack CD of the score and laid overtop is the 11-page liner note booklet from Jeff Lieberman’s 2020 memoir “Day of the Living Me: Adventures of a Subversive Cult Filmmaker From the Golden Age,” plus the CD track listing, production credits, and special thanks on the backside. A reproduction of the original one sheet poster is stored in the insert as a mini-folded poster along with Synapse’s 2024 catalogue for your perusing pleasure. The rated-R film has a runtime of 95 minutes, and the limited edition doesn’t limit itself to a confined playback with region free decoding.

Last Rites: In order to snag a copy of this stellar Synapse set, muscles are required as this heavy boxset feels like 5lbs of software and hardware special features regarding Jeff Leiberman’s drugs-are-bad thriller “Blue Sunshine” with chrome dome, blank-stare killers doing the dormant bidding of 10-years-old recessed LSD.

Trip Out on Synapse’s Limited Edition “Blue Sunshine”