Ten Days of Terror!: Just Before Dawn

Film: Just Before Dawn
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I tend to write somewhere between 750 and 1000 words for these reviews, give or take. Sometimes I write a little less, but not much, and sometimes I have a lot more to say. The problem with writing longer reviews is that sometimes I come across a movie that doesn’t really have a lot that I can say about it. Just Before Dawn is that kind of movie. This is a slasher movie from the early eighties. Have you seen a late-’70s/early-’80s slasher before? If the answer is yes, you’ve seen probably 90% of this movie. That’s not an exaggeration.

A slasher like Just Before Dawn needs to start us with a kill or two to get things going. To that end, we are introduced to Ty (Mike Kellin) and his nephew Vachel (Charles Bartlett), who are drunk and at least pretending to hunt. They investigate what looks like an abandoned church. Suddenly, their truck appears to have its parking brake release, and it careens down the hill, sending Ty after it. In the church, a mysterious shape appears and stabs Vachel in the junk. When that shape walks out of the church, Ty runs off.

Ten Days of Terror!: Blue Sunshine

Film: Blue Sunshine
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

In the early ‘90s, when everyone was getting cable and channels like HBO and CineMax ruled the television world, there was a show called “Red Shoe Diaries,” which was essentially an attempt at classy softcore porn. It was produced by a guy named Zalman King, memorable for the odd first name. I never realized that Zalman King was also an actor in the years prior to his forays into soft focus boobs. That includes his starring role in Blue Sunshine, one of three movies I know of where a bald woman is a focus of the advertising (the others being The Naked Kiss and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Feel free to add others in the comments).

Blue Sunshine feels like a mash-up between Reefer Madness and God Told Me To. It’s also one of those films that wants to work up the audience by claiming that they story they are about to hear is based in fact. In that respect, it’s done well. The plot of the movie centers around a batch of bad LSD known as Blue Sunshine that was used around Stanford in the late 1960s. What we discover as the movie goes on is that people who used Blue Sunshine are having very delayed and serious fallout from their former drug use. Ten years after they used it, they start suffering whanging headaches. They also lose all of their hair, and eventually have a complete psychotic break and start murdering everyone around them indiscriminately. We get a little of that in the film’s opening.