Blue Sunshine 1977

At a lively party, Frannie Scott, Richard Crystal croons the jazz standard “Just in Time” and playfully tries to kiss his friend’s date, only to have the friend grab Frannie’s hair. The hair comes off with it, and the bald Frannie spirals into a psychotic break, brutally murdering several party guests and chasing Jerry Zipkin, Zalman King, into the nearby road where a passing truck ends the pursuit with Frannie’s death.

Jerry Zipkin is then wrongly accused and goes on the run, aided by Alicia Sweeney, Deborah Winters, and surgeon David Blume, Robert Walden. As he digs for the truth, he uncovers a disturbing pattern: ten years earlier a group of college students had taken a new form of LSD called Blue Sunshine, supplied by dealer Ed Flemming, and are now bald and homicidal many years after their trips.

Flemming, who has since become a respected local politician pursuing Congress, lies to Jerry, insisting he never heard of Blue Sunshine. When Jerry visits Flemming’s estranged wife, Wendy, Ann Cooper, he finds her bald and menacingly close to murdering two children she’s babysitting. He manages to save the children by pushing Wendy off her apartment balcony, but he ends up branded as the killer himself.

Determined to prove that Blue Sunshine drives homicidal psychosis, Jerry seeks a surviving user who can be tested for chromosome damage. He arms himself with a paraldehyde dart gun and heads to a Flemming rally at a shopping mall, learning that Wayne Mulligan, Ray Young, Flemming’s campaign manager and bodyguard, was a heavy Blue Sunshine user.

Before Jerry arrives, the bald Wayne goes on a rampage through the mall’s discotheque, assaulting patrons—including a police detective—and Alicia, triggering a panic that makes the mall resemble a battlefield. The crowd erupts in fear, and a patron’s shouted line becomes the film’s most famous moment: > There’s a bald maniac in there, and he’s going batshit! <

Jerry tracks Wayne to an empty department store and paralyzes him with the dart gun, bringing a grim halt to the spree. An on-screen epilogue notes that Wayne was tested and found to have “extensive chromosomic aberrations,” and that 255 doses of Blue Sunshine are still unaccounted for, underscoring a chilling, unresolved mystery that lingers beyond the immediate chaos.