Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Gives new meaning to the term "midnight snack", 1 Feb 2005
Death Bed - The Bed That Eats - it sounds like something a second-grader would write, doesn't it? Obviously, this is not your typical horror film. The title alone compelled me to watch the film, and what I discovered is a sort of mystery. There's nothing mysterious about the film, really; the mystery comes in the reactions other people have had to this long-lost film of the 1970s. Some treat the film as some macabre work of art, expound upon supposedly enlightening fairy tale elements of the story and presentation, play up the erotic nature of the theme, and comment on the macabre humor underlying such a rich presentation. Folks, I won't lie to you - I didn't see any of that stuff in this film. It's a bed, and it eats people - that's about all there is, except for the increasingly weird story of the bed's creation and ultimate destruction. We find this huge, ornate, hungry bed inside an old stone grotto somewhere on an abandoned estate. No one comes here anymore - apparently a slew of missing persons in that locale scared everyone away long ago, so the bed sleeps (and snores and makes other disturbing man-like sounds). Then an amorous couple shows up, only to find out that they were looking for love in all the wrong places. That's Breakfast. Lunch and Dinner come in the form of a trio of young women who have decided to drive out to the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. One of the girls disturbs, even scares, the bed, and this leads us into a discussion of the bed's origins. Of course, the bed can't speak for itself; fortunately, decades ago it trapped the spirit of an artist who painted the bed while he was lying in it dying of consumption. Let me tell you, this bed got around in its younger days, even serving at one time as the central element in an outdoor "sexual rejuvenator" scheme. I won't tell you how the bed actually eats its victims, nor will I explain the really weird story of its origins - I don't want to take away what little fun you might have with this weird little film. There is a little blood and gore involved, but none of it is very graphic in nature. In my opinion, this really isn't a very good film. Some viewers may talk about some sort of Death Bed epiphany, but I didn't take much of anything away from this cinematic experience. The story of the film is an unusual one, though. A college student named George Barry made this film in the early 1970s on 16mm color film; he finally finished it in 1977, but he was not able to generate any interest in distributing it. Without Barry's knowledge, however, a pirated version of the film found its way into the market in the late 1980s; he only learned about this - accidentally - in 2002. Now the film has been released properly, giving credit where credit is due, as a Lost Horror Film of the Seventies. This is all well and good, but in my opinion Death Bed just isn't a very good horror movie.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Well, lets see, it's all about this bed, right.... , 6 Nov 2008
........and, it eats people...and there you go. You know that's not how I do things, Anyway I can't say I liked this movie, but then again, I can't say I didn't like it either. I'm more fascinated by the fact that this movie was made at all. In fact, I'm more fascinated by the fact that they started shooting in 1972 and took 5 years to finish filming. At no point did George Barry decide that this little gem wasn't worth finishing, even though after it didn't get distribution he promptly forgot about it.
You'll come to fine out that a demon falls in lust with a girl, but when she dies from his attentions, he grieves and his blood falls on a bed, turning it into a hungry creature that digests anything placed on it. The bed can make flowers grow out of a skull, lock doors, drag bodies around, make munching sounds and pour pepto-bismol out of a bottle. The bed has a pool of digestive juices with blood that can swallow anything without soiling the sheets and it can bring an artist back as a ghost, paint his fingernails black and imprison him behind a painting. A reasonably good premise, some intelligent and clever moments, good fix for the seven dollar budget, but the AWFUL narration, the gigantic lapses in continuity, the lack of explanation or identification of characters...nonetheless this is one of those pix that was so miserable yet well-intentioned that it was great.
But I sat there revising the film in my head and hoping that Craven or Carpenter or even Roth would see this DVD and decide to re-do it with real money and real actors and a real script. Still, if you love lousy horror movies (and you're in the lousy horror movie section) this is a great way to kill a bag of popcorn with a couple of friends.
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