Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)

June 29, 2018

Full disclosure: I decided to watch this movie as a goof with some friends expecting it to be garbage that we could riff on. What we got was actually a really fun and interesting film. Filmed with absolutely no budget, the director/writer George Barry (Death Bed was his only film credit listed on IMDB) puts together a really interesting and surreal film about a bed that is possessed by a demon. 

Death Bed is about a demon who falls in love with a woman whom dies on a bed. After the demon accidently bleeds onto the bed, the bed comes to life and eats whomever rests upon it (often after the women in the scene have become topless because hey... you're not going to make a movie about a bed that eats people and not have a little nudity!). The bed also captured a guy who died of tuberculosis and turned him into a painting which talks to the bed. A final group of teenagers stumble upon the bed and it is up to them to stop its murderous rampage.

First, what I was worried about is that I wasn't going to get enough death in Death Bed. After watching Microwave Massacre and Demented Death Farm Massacre, both of which had little to no massacres, I'm leery of horror movie titles. Luckily this one delivers! In the film the bed consumes a least a dozen people! It sucks them into it and dissolves them in a type of acid. In the opening scene the bed dissolves a bottle of wine, a bucket of chicken and a apple before sending the remnants back on the bed (we're left with an empty bottle, chicken bones and an apple core). The bed of course eats the couple who left the food right after. Being able to see the stuff dissolve is a pretty cool special effect.

After that couple, there is a string of death bed eatings: A couple of Italian gangsters who trying shooting the bed when they discover it is trying to eat them. An entire orgy. Several couples. A priest. An older woman looking at lesbian pornography. And most of the group of teenagers who arrive at the castle (?) where the death bed is at. There is one great scene where the death bed eats part of a woman's legs before letting her crawl in a overly long scene out the door only to grab her again with its sheets and pull her in to finish her.

There are also some cool surreal aspects to the film. There is dream sequences where characters look at a death book that becomes mirrors and a dying man paints the bed where he is going to die at and the death bed turns him into the painting.

The film is not without its mistakes. The entire film's audio is rerecorded in a studio and doubled with the excessive voice overs makes it confusing who is talking and are they actually talking or is this a voice over. It also doesn't help that when characters do talk, they very often do not move their mouths. Also there is this scene towards the end that is just ridiculous:

The guy is the guy who plays Mr. Mathews from Boy Meets World.

Despite these problems, what makes the film a good movie is that you can tell the film creators really took this film seriously and tried to make a great film. Upon watching it, it is apparent that this was the director's passion project. There is an atmosphere to the film that the creators painstakingly created which the film score, bed noises and overall look of the room. It has an almost gothic feel to it. In the end, the film creators took a silly concept and made a very creative and fun film to watch.