Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977, George Barry)

Originally written 26 March 2009 for The Screengrab. Reprinted by permission.

Like many people, my introduction to George Barry’s Death Bed: The Bed That Eats came through the stand-up comedy of Patton Oswalt. In this routine, Oswalt complains about the difficult process of bringing a big-screen project to fruition- writing a script, selling it to a studio, enduring the clueless questions and comments from studio functionaries, and so on. In Oswalt’s mind, Death Bed is forever mocking him- a movie that, despite its lame-brained premise and Z-grade production values, actually got made. Oswalt’s Death Bed bit- like nearly everything he’s done- is hilarious, but it’s also the best advertising Barry could’ve hoped for, turning a long-buried exploitation movie into something of a cult favorite.

The premise of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is so simple that the title scarcely needs the phrase after the colon to sum it up. Simply put, there’s this bed, and it eats damn near anything that’s unlucky enough to sit, or lie down, or be set down, upon it. Of course, there’s more to the movie than a series of bed-related murders. There’s a backstory involving the bed’s origins- the demon who tried to seduce a young woman years ago, and the somewhat ill-defined curse that befell the bed when she rebuffed the demon’s advances. There’s also the spirit of an artist who was consumed by the bed who is now trapped behind one of his paintings, and who observes the killings and takes care of all the exposition in voiceover.

But really, this is basically a movie about a bed that eats people, which should be enough to tell you whether you’ll like it or not. In my experience, people are either down with cheeseball exploitation movies or they’re not, and never the twain shall meet. My pal Steve C., who originally recommended this to me, is something of a connoisseur of the cinema du fromage, and he found Death Bed to be just his cup of tea. On the other hand, my girlfriend, bless her heart, found it pretty insufferable. A few hearty laughs aside, she pretty much hated it, and when it was over, she sarcastically remarked about how much watching the movie had enriched her life. Thanks for trying anyway, honey.

As for me, I’m in the middle. I’m no aficionado of the form, but I’ve seen and enjoyed more than enough to know that Death Bed is no better or worse than most no-budget exploitation fare of the day. There are a handful of classic moments, but writer/director/producer George Barry just doesn’t have the filmmaking chops to make the movie work for more than a minute or so at a time. The editing is choppy, the camerawork barely functional, the storytelling fragmented, the ending completely arbitrary. What’s more, the movie also lacks the kind of fully committed insanity of which exploitation classics are made. Barry lacks the courage of his convictions, and he fails to fully exploit the wacked-out possibilities that his premise presents.

That’s not to say that there aren’t inspired bits in the film. I had high hopes during the film’s first few minutes, beginning with Barry opening the film with a pitch black screen under which we hear only the chomping of the titular bed. He then progresses to the first killing scene (following a title card that reads “Breakfast”), in which we see the bed eat an apple and a bucket of chicken and drink a bottle of wine, leaving the core, picked-over bones, and empty bottle behind. Pretty impressive trick, especially when you consider that the bed has feet but no hands. How the bed consumes its victims is never explained in detail- it seems to have a solid mattress, but it absorbs its prey with a sort of foam, and once it begins eating Barry cuts to shots of the food/victims submerged in a pool of bubbling liquid, as though they’re drowning in corrosive Alka-Seltzer. But then, one doesn’t watch a movie called Death Bed expecting exhaustive detail on the physiology of man-eating sleep implements (hoping perhaps, but hardly expecting). Also, the bed tends to wait for its prey to come to it, although it’s prone to manipulating the house that surrounds it to trap its victims, and at one point it even uses a sheet to lasso a victim who tries to escape.

Watching this scene, I couldn’t help but notice that while the Death Bed generally quick work of its previous (white) victims, it took its time with this African-American woman, eating away at the skin on her legs before she escaped, then allowing her to crawl slowly across the floor to help the bed draw in more victims before roping her in for the kill. But while this initially seemed like dodgy racial politics, subsequent scenes revealed a different reality- that she was the only one in the cast who could convincingly act like she was actually suffering. The rest of the cast consists of the kind of blank-faced nobodies who populated most exploitation movies, like the guy who reacts to the skin on his hands being eaten away with an expression that suggests that someone nearby has recently passed gas. Death Bed isn’t as bad as its premise would suggest, but in a way that makes it all the more disappointing, because Barry includes enough entertaining moments (the Pepto-Bismol!) that it makes one wish the whole movie was on that same level.