BLUE SUNSHINE

   Film (1977). Ellanby/Blue Sunshine Co. Written and dir Jeff Lieberman, starring Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Mark Goddard, Robert Walden. 95 mins. Colour.

   Lieberman's first film was a witty (if disgusting) MONSTER MOVIE, Squirm * (1976) - the last word on killer worms; its novelization was Squirm (1976) by Richard A. CURTIS. BS, Lieberman's second feature, is also unusually sharp and amusing for a low-budget exploitation movie. Middle-class ex-hippies inexplicably lose their hair and turn homicidal. The culprit turns out to be Blue Sunshine, an LSD variant - the bad acid they dropped a decade earlier has taken its toll on their chromosomes. As Kim NEWMAN puts it in Nightmare Movies (1984; rev 1988), "the flower children have become the Living Dead". The dialogue is good, the metaphor potent. BS is as pointed a film of sf social commentary as any that appeared in its decade, though its theme of human metamorphosis through corrupt TECHNOLOGY perhaps owes something to David CRONENBERG.

   PN