Reader beware, you're in for a scare - and not the kind of scare you might want from a horror film.
If this movie sounds familiar to you, comedian Patton Oswalt mentioned it at some length in his Werewolves & Lollipops album. If it doesn't seem familiar, that's likely because this film was made in the 1970s, and never ever released, until just recently on DVD. It's a lost movie, that has the dubious honor of being a lost film that should have remained lost. It wasn't released for a damn good reason, as I shall delve into thusly.
My friend and I had heard about this film, from Patton, and decided it might be fun to watch and mock. We asked the local video store if they had it, and they said they did not, but would order it. It would be ready by September. Who knew September would become such an ominous and terrible month.
Please, I beg of you, take this review not just as a review, or a comedic ripping apart of someone else's work; take it as a DIRE warning.
Story/Plot
Some vague amount of time ago (one can assume at least a century), a demon tree decided to become a breeze, then finds a girl, becomes a person and makes a bed. They proceed to fornicate on the bed maybe, but the chick dies, the demon cries blood, and the blood gets on the bed. Now the bed falls under the ownership of random priests, artists and orgyists, and proceeds to eat them all by dissolving them with a disgusting yellow foam, and yet inexplicably chewing. In the present, random assholes find the bed and have sex on or undress near it, all the while killing them while some douche in a painting waits for the original demon to fall asleep so he can somehow kill the bed.
If that sounds confusing, don't take it as a sign that my writing skills leave something to be desired. That's as best as I could describe the plot of this movie. Why was it so hard? Because this film is incredibly convoluted, characters pop in and out without any explanation whatsoever, and the series of events are told so lazily that we get exposition in it's most obvious form; a character reminiscing about past events. SERIOUSLY. The guy in the painting, throughout the WHOLE movie, engages in a one-sided conversation with this bed, asking it why it does things, then answers his own questions, all the while providing plot details during the lull in action. Which is pretty much the whole movie.
To say this movie has a completely random, convoluted plot that seems to have been written haphazardly as the filming took place is to give this film far too much credit.
Acting
NON-EXISTENT. The actors just wander about with dull gazes on their faces, narrating lines with such boredom that the bed seems much less threatening than a bed that slowly dissolves you already is. Never again will I harshly judge movies like House of Wax or the Saw series or what-have-you ever again, because as bad as their acting is, they at least ACT. Fucking ZOMBIES have more pathos than these emotionless shades. They don't even act terrified or in pain. One guy loses his goddamn hands to the bed, and pulls out nothing but the bones (still attached somehow), and he just looks mildly bemused. BEMUSED. If I lost my hands to an acidic bed, I'd be slightly more distressed than that. Did the casting director decide to hire mutes or something?
The one scene of "acting" I saw in the movie that actually sort of impressed me was when the token black chick somehow escaped the bed after having her legs half-eaten. She finds herself crawling to the door without being able to use her legs, and she does a good job of not using her legs. But that's it. That's literally the only scene in the movie that I'd even consider to have any acting at all. The rest of the scenes feature random people basically reading their lines out loud. Sometimes. Most of it was voice-over anyway. So really, the film is just people wandering aimlessly around the woods.
Special Effects/Production Values
To call these effects "special" is only apt when one uses the word "special" in an ironic, insulting sense. When I heard about this movie, I envisioned a bed that literally morphed into a monster mouth and chewed people up in a bloodbath with bones flying and organs crunching under the weight of the massive teeth of this four-poster bed. That turned out to be expecting WAY too much from this movie. Foam forms around stuff on the bed, which are shot at angles so that you don't see (most of the time) the holes food and people are being pulled through. Then they cut to said foodstuff/peoplestuff floating in yellow water. That's it. That's how the bed eats you. It's so lame, even for the seventies. The seventies had Star Wars and Close Encounters, don't tell me that bed-monster technology doesn't exist. No, this was foam, holes, and a tank of piss.
As for production values, they too sucked. The room the Death Bed resides in literally is cardboard walls painted to look like brick. The outside scenes were filmed out in the forest somewhere. Everything else was depicted with the green screen of the 70s, the black screen. It looked very much like the set of a cheap porno. Which is not that far from what the film was. Random nudity occurred a lot. A LOT. I think only one girl did not undress in this movie at inexplicable moments.
This movie could be made better with $70. Better yet, it could be made better with the 1970s equivalent of $70. There's no excuse for this nightmare.
Music
There wasn't any. There was only noise.
Disturbing Factor
VERY strong. If I gave positive points for proficiency in this category, it'd be a 0/4. The bed masturbates. In the immortal words of thespian/schmucky the clown Lewis Black, I WILL REPEAT THAT; The BED MASTURBATES! Need I say anything more?
Editing
Really bad. The first scene had two people talking and the words they said did not match their mouth movement. This had me believing that this may be a foreign film. Of course, next time someone spoke it was in proper sync. That just means the very first shot with people in it was butchered so badly that it would make people think the film was foreign. I think they decided to narrate everything (literally, ALMOST EVERYTHING) else so as to avoid this dilemma.
As for the rest of it, exposition was deposited in random places where the director basically thought, "Oh shit! We need this scene in there or the movie won't make sense! Stick it in there someplace!" (Clearly the director forgot a few of these, as the movie did not make any sense)
Direction
This movie reads as if the director found a camera laying around in the woods, and decided to make a movie on the spot. He found a few random people, most of whom were willing to be naked for the chance to be in a movie, and used what he could find in an afternoon to make a horror film. Having found a hole in the ground, his grandma's bed, and a few bad paintings, he decided to make Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. And so he did.
BAD, BAD directing.
Happy Ending
Everyone dies. EVERYONE. The bed. The dipshits who somehow survived the bed that were tricked into death by the painting man. The painting man. EVERYONE. That's what I call a happy-fucking-ending.
FINAL SCORE:
5/4
Even this score is a generous score. I say 5/4 only because I am wary of redefining my entire movie Gradation Scale by creating a new score lower than this. I toyed with it. I contemplated giving it a 6/4, which would be the rating given to things that technically are not movies. A porno would score a 6/4. Or a chair. Or non-matter. This film is on par with non-existence. Do you understand the implication that I am making? This movie is SO BAD, it borders on not being a movie at all. This is better described as a mishmash of videos and sounds sewn together in a remedial attempt at a narrative with boobs thrown in for good measure. Oh, and a demon bed that eats you. That was really more of an afterthought, or a catalyst for nudity. And at that point I say, why not just make a porno? Make a porno, not a horrible movie that would score higher on my scale had it never been made.
I am truly sorry for unleashing this wretched thing upon the people of Halifax. I post this in the hopes that maybe I can reduce the destruction I have wrought upon Metro's cinematic landscape.
Yours in horror,
- Silent G
