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If you want to talk about obscure--really obscure--fright films, here's a real doozie for you...a film so "lost" that even its producer wasn't aware it had been brought out on home video until it popped up on the Net! Made in 1977 but never released theatrically and not even "officially" released to DVD until a couple of years ago, Death Bed has the makings of a true artsy cult flick with its spare-change budget, mostly obtuse storyline, truly bizarre and disturbing images, and a demonic bed that eats people (and other things, too). Yet, without even opening credits and a lack of coherence throughout, this is an amateur film project still awaiting completion--or, perhaps better stated, it's...
By HANK REARDON I’ve been screening do-it-yourself horror pictures lately: first the lamentable Equinox (1970) and now the lame Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), a genuine cinematic oddity, but an amateur film nonetheless, and the only one ever directed by one George Barry of Detroit. Death Bed is a film of artful awfulness. Completed in 1977 after five years of intermittent filming, Death Bed was never released on the drive-in circuit, as its young director had hoped, but a bootleg video copy circulated in the early 1980s, which led to a fanzine buzz and to the film being picked up 27 years after its completion by Cult Epics.
Releasing it alongside such timeless classics as Manson Family Movies and The Driller Killer, Cult Epics bills Death Bed as the "lost horror film of the Seventies" and "the strangest bedtime story ever told! … George Barry's uniquely weird journey through a world of wind demons, carnivorous furnishings and the spirit of Aubrey Beardsley! At the edge of a grand estate, near a crumbling old mansion lies a strange stone building with just a single room. In the room, a four-poster bed waits to absorb the flesh, blood and life essence of unwary travelers…" In a DVD extra feature, 57-year-old Barry describes how the film was based on a (drug-induced?) dream of an enveloping bed. The story was imagined as a combination of surrealistic fairy tale interlaced with more traditional horror and exploitation elements.
Death Bed has received high praise in underground film circles. There are those who say it earns its rightful place in the annals of 1970s midnight cult films like Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos and El Topo. But really, folks, Death Bed is not that good. It only cost $30,000, and though it has some things to recommend it (such as a great setup), it cannot escape the constraints imposed by a micro-budget. What is amazing is that Death Bed developed a cult following after the film was pirated by an unscrupulous distributor in the United Kingdom. And then, like the devouring bed, the film bided its time while its renown grew and grew, until literally dozens of astute film watchers in Europe knew about it. (I’d never even heard of Death Bed until Renfield assigned me to review it.) Barry eventually went online, performed a Google Search and found several sites where his unreleased film was being reviewed and discussed. He had no idea that Death Bed ever saw release anywhere, and here it was, described as a "forgotten horror classic" on the Internet.
Death Bed starts off in blackness, with 30 seconds of munching sounds. We find out later that it’s actually the bed eating some pitiful victim (or his belongings, as this bed is omnivorous, devouring valises, picnic baskets and even bottles of Pepto-Bismol). A fin-de-siècle, Syd Barrett type languishes in a tiny cell built into the wall of a spacious room dominated by an ornate bed. The narrator claims to have been stuck in the wall behind his painting of the bed for "60 years, since I died" (on the Death Bed, uneaten). The artist is forced to watch helplessly when the bed lucks upon an unsuspecting victim or two. Judging by the decadent style of the pen-and-ink sketches, this prisoner is supposed to be Aubrey Beardsley, the English artist who was quite famous in hippiedom back in the early seventies, along with MC Escher and Peter Max.
In his short life, there is no indication that Beardsley ever traveled to the United States or to the Detroit area (where Death Bed was filmed). Beardsley died of tuberculosis in Menton, France, at the age of 25 on March 16, 1898--d not in 1917, as the trapped artist reveals in Death Bed. The bed (modeled after The Great Bed of Ware) is quite imposing--an Elizabethan monstrosity concealing a swirling, bubbling amber bath of digestive juices. (So a more accurate title would be Death Waterbed.) No sign of any teeth, even though the bed can often be heard munching away on human remains. Once it has feasted, the Death Bed snores peacefully.
Barry adds even more peculiar touches, such as a dream sequence in which a young lady is served a meal consisting of an enormous winged tropical cockroach crawling over green goo, and other scenes where the bed somehow gives gifts of accessories belonging to the victims to the trapped artist. For example, one victim dies with a lit cigarette in her hand and then we see the artist enjoying a smoke. Death Bed is so low budget it doesn’t even have opening credits. The closing credits were only added when the film was belatedly released on DVD, although clever thematic intertitles break up the story into Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Just Desserts. (The sound was also cleaned up and Cyclobe, a British electronic band, recorded a new score for the DVD release version.)
The pace of the film is almost too leisurely. The camera glides around as if it is wary of the bed. The plot is mainly devoted to a series of lousy actors in outrageous hairdos slowly coming to rest upon the bed and dissolving in a yellow, bubbling fuzz. Venturing into the remote area, a young couple enters the strange premises and decides to have a picnic on the bed. They lay out apples, wine and a bucket of chicken. Then they make out, fully clothed. There are no nude scenes in Death Bed, although many were shot, according to Barry.
Meanwhile, the bed sucks the food under the sheets, dissolving it in fizzing acids and pulling the wine right out of the bottle, then ejecting the unwanted apple core, empty wine bottle and chicken bones back onto the bed sheets, before pulling the curtains around the oblivious lovers and eating them, too. The artist behind the painting reminisces about the events that brought him to this wretched state, as stock footage of bustling early 1900’s New York City and spinning front pages of The Daily Bugle are seen onscreen. An unconvincing headline (clumsily stripped in on one of the mock newspapers) screams: "Strange munching sounds heard in the night!" Another paper flashes the headline: "Mayor demands action!" while the next one announces the mayor’s mysterious disappearance.
Seems the bed has been around for almost a century, the tragic results of a tree demon (or elemental being--half spirit, half force of nature) that fell in love with a corn-fed country girl. The demon killed the girl while seducing her. Drops of her blood fell on the bed and were absorbed into the sheets. How this bloodshed creates a carnivorous bed--and a dead guy behind a wall--makes no sense, even in a surrealistic film with a very deliberate and carefully thought out setup. Barry based the story on a dream he had, and dreams rarely make any real sense, whether opium-fueled or not. The last third of the film revolves around a trio of hippie chicks who fall under the bed's evil spell, and the heroic longhair (William Russ of Boy Meets World!) who tries to save the day, but ultimately gets his hands melted off for his troubles. But even he isn't all that upset about this horrible maiming, registering little pain as his arms are burned away and only the skeleton is left. (And then the bones start snapping off!) It’s almost as if the characters are sleepwalking their way into the bed’s gullet. Only one of them puts up much of a fight, dragging herself away from the killer bed after being half-submerged in stomach acids.
In a perfect example of the film’s slow pacing, the camera lingers over the injured girl as she crawls moaning to the doorway. She almost makes it, but then a blanket shoots out from the bed, wraps itself around her useless legs and pulls her back into the acid bath. It’s quite a sadistic scene. I thought of a cat toying with a mouse. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats sounds more demented in the telling than in the actual viewing. It is one weird snoozefest that’s hard to digest. And yet I wish George Barry had been given other opportunities to direct. Based on one or two brilliant moments, the man had exceptional talent, but he had to work with no budget and with terrible actors (William Russ and voice of Patrick Spence-Thomas excepted). I wonder what Barry would have done with a respectable budget. Thanks, Hank. Yes, if George Barry had managed to get this flick released to theaters back in the Seventies, and it had been picked up for the Midnight Movie circuit along with El Topo and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he may well still be directing films today and not relegated to an obscure footnote in outré film history. Certainly, he made the most of his tiny budget in Death Bed, and he does achieve some beautifully composed and still startling images. But a coherent story and characters with more than one dimension to them is what makes a real movie and those are missing from Death Bed. Too bad he didn't get another crack at doing a better job of it. Article copyright © Hank Reardon |
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