Murder in a Blue World is a psychedelic dystopian horror film that takes visual and thematic inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The film follows a beautiful nurse, who seduces young men, takes them home to bed, listens to the post-coital beating of their hearts, and then stabs them to death with a surgical scalpel.
To make things more meta-textual, the killer nurse is played by Sue Lyon, whose breakout role was for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. While Murder in a Blue World was clearly made to capitalize on the success of A Clockwork Orange, the film carves its own narrative and thematic path that’s worthy of deeper examination.
Lyon does a spellbinding job at playing a charismatic predator. Like all the best serial killers in fiction, the audience is horrified by her kills but can empathize with her perspective. What is murder in a dystopian facsimile of life? The film also challenges gender norms and subtly critiques homosexual persecution. Even the gang violence is given a new context with some members being unwilling to victimize innocent strangers.
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was controversial when it premiered and could be considered even more controversial in today’s trigger-happy climate. Murder in a Blue World is no mere rip-off but a different story that takes place within the same world as A Clockwork Orange. Murder in a Blue World gives more empathy to its violent protagonists and should be reappraised as a transgressive film ahead of its time.
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