Notice "my favorite" and not "the best." No one is ever going to be fooled that this is a traditionally good movie. It's called Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, for god's sake. But it's a special thing when a movie comes along that meets your every movie going need... Death Bed just hits that sweet spot for me.
I know I'm really getting into a movie when I all of a sudden realize that I've been watching it for most of it's run-time with my mouth agape, just sort of amazed at what I am seeing. I get this sort of confused feeling, like I'm on drugs, or I've been transported to another land where the accepted rules of story-telling no longer apply. Death Bed is trippy, funny, artsy, and entertaining in all of the ways that I'm looking for in a cult film. Classic.
You can probably guess what Death Bed is about. A bed that eats people. That's all you need to know. If you are in any way inclined to watch this (i.e. you're into offbeat cinema), don't bother reading anymore. I couldn't accurately describe it anyways, but it's worth going in as blindly as possible.
The titular bed is a big fancy four-poster that has been possessed by Demon Tears (!). It has been left in some sort of semi-abandoned house/castle/property. It doesn't talk, but can still grunt/make munching sounds/pant like a dog etc. Providing us with the backstory of the bed, in voiceover form, is a ghost - an artist who has been cursed to watch over the bed and it's antics. Basically, the bed can control the house and entice people into its room by opening/locking doors, etc. And once they are there...
It eats. People (or other things) get sucked into the covers, into a viscous yellow fluid which either eats away all of your flesh, makes your clothes bloody, or selectively takes bites (an apple, for instance, is eaten and the core is spit out back onto the sheets). It can do what it wants!
The film is broken into 4 sections - Breakfast (a prologue where 2 unlucky lovebirds come across the bed for a romantic rendezvous), Lunch, Dinner, and Just Desserts. After Breakfast, we are introduced to our main characters (by virtue of them being in the movie the most), three young women who are getting away from the city by visiting this house that a friend just - owns? The owner has never been there, but thought it would be a nice place for these folks to visit. There may or may not be a romantic thing going on with two of the women, but there is definitely a third wheel named Susan, who gets separated from the group because prefers to sleep during the day (?). Because of her time alone, Susan gets a little first-hand experience with the titular bed.
What I didn't like
The intentional humor. There were a couple of moments where the filmmaker (writer-producer-director George Barry) tries to wink at the audience. The bed drinks Pepto Bismol. And, since I feel obliged to reference newspaper shots in this blog:
For context, there are 4 newspaper headline shots in a row. (And after screen-capturing them, they are all the same newspaper, unless the Daily Bugle runs the same picture of the injured Fireman every day.) (1) "THOUSANDS DISAPPEAR!" (2) "STRANGE MUNCHING SOUNDS HEARD IN THE NIGHT!" (3) "MAYOR DEMANDS ACTION" (4) "MAYOR DISAPPEARS."
Okay, so that's a little funny. But honestly, most of Death Bed is played so straight, so these moments of humor, while occasionally amusing, are a tonal mismatch.
What I did like.
Everything else.
This isn't one of those laugh-a-minute "OMG look how cheesy this is/laugh a minute" cult movies. Death Bed can be slow, but even then it's hypnotically slow. It's more... strange? Voice-overs come and go with no rhyme or reason. Scenes go on long enough to be funny, and then keep going. And going. And some of it is outright disturbing. Close-ups of Susan biting off a hangnail until it is bloody, or a freaky dream sequence where she eats a live bug. It's a lot more film-student artsy (and I don't mean that in a disparaging way) than you usually get it a "cult classic." And even if you think an attack from a bed is kind of stupid, sometimes it can be troubling in a way too - think the tree-attack scene from Evil Dead.
There are so many little things that I want to write about here, but it wouldn't be worth it. It really just needs to be taken as a whole. It's like that terrible IMAX slogan - you don't see Death Bed, you *experience* it. It won't be for everybody, or even most people. But if you are into this kind of thing, it really is a must-see. And really, the title should let you know right away if this is for you or not. Death Bed has it's own flavor, it's own style, and is just really, really hard to describe.
Ultimately
I would buy the recently released BluRay (thank you Cult Epics!) and watch it often. I love this film.
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