1976; color

Directed by Jeff Lieberman

Starring: Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Mark Goddard, Robert Walden & Charles Siebert

Monstroid
[Shout Factory]

1979; color

Directed by Kenneth Hartford

Starring: James Mitchum, John Carradine & Anthony Eisley

First up is Blue Sunshine. This one confuses the viewer right out of the gate with one of the more curious opening sequences I've seen in a while. It's a sequence of brief "introductory" moments where we get little glimpses into the lives of the people we assume will be the main characters in the story. (And, in some cases, we are right.) First, we meet a pill-popping doctor on his rounds; then a woman wearing an obvious wig baby-sitting two children (we also learn that she's been recently dumped by a local politician); followed by a really annoying wife sitting at her kitchen table with some random dude who owns a large dog, talking about her husband never being around while her annoying children try to raid the refrigerator with the family parrot on their back. Yeah, that's right a parrot. And, believe it or not, in retrospect the parrot thing almost kinda sorta makes sense. Which is about the most you can hope for in this movie. Anywhoo, all of this is interspersed with the credits and the repeated showing of a full moon with a curiously blue cast. Hmmm, could the blue sunshine of the title be a euphemism for the moon? Well, maybe… in some other movie. In this one the words blue sunshine refer to an acid made on the Stanford campus in the '60s that has some sort of delayed reaction causing people to lose their hair, be extremely bothered by loud noises and essentially become murderous maniacs. Except no one knows that yet; neither the people watching the movie, nor the people that took the acid. Sorry to spoil that for you. Don't worry though, there's a lot more nonsense, wrapped around a barely plausible plotline, yet to come. Overall I had mixed feelings about this movie. On the one hand, it has a pretty original plot and could have been a really memorable flick; for the right reasons. (Could have being the operative words.) On the other hand this movie is flawed beyond belief and I had to yell at the screen several times. It does have a number of memorable moments - the party freak-out, the woman going over the balcony, the "climactic" disco rampage, and pretty much all instances of people having a very delayed LSD experience - but most, if not all, of these scenes really evoke laughter more than fright.

Next up we have Monstroid, a toxic-monster-in-the-lake movie not completely dissimilar to our other menu item for this week, Creature From The Hillbilly Lagoon. This film (it's called Monster in the credits) sets itself aside from all of the other films of this ilk by claiming to be based on a true story and featuring the previously unheard of - and we assume never to be heard of again - pairing of John Carradine and Robert Mitchum's son. Oh and, as a bonus, it briefly features Phillip Carey, aka Asa Buchanan on One Life To Live. (His character died on the show not too long ago; RIP Asa.) I'm not sure what kind of documentation the filmmaker may be able to produce to back up their claim exactly. As I would have been less than a year old and living in my parent's apartment in Northeast Philly at the time of this supposed Colombian amphibious monster invasion we'll have to not believe them... I mean, take their word for it. So yeah, all of the standard touchstones of this type of film are touched upon here: the unsuspecting horny people, the suspecting environmentalists, the ambivalent industrial concern, the ignorant policemen, etc. (And, of course, one completely fake looking monster.) All wrapped up in one ridiculously bad transfer that oddly enough, is actually completely apt in relation to the film itself. If you like old school movies of this type , or just obsessed with John Carradine (like the Kommandant), you may as well add this one onto your "seen it" list.
—Bunny