Seriously–A Review of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

I don’t now if you’ve ever heard of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.  If you haven’t, that’s goodish for you, I guess.  The first I’d heard about it was HERE, on Patton Oswalt’s amazing album Werewolves and Lollipops (that link there connects to some amazing audio, so don’t be afeared to click it).  Patton gets the name of the film wrong (as you can see from the picture above, the titular bed doesn’t eat “People” in the title, just the rest of the movie) but gets pretty much everything else about the plot right.

There is a bed, you see, and it is cursed and it eats people.  But there’s also a man who lives in the painting that hangs above the bed.  He’s been trapped there for a few hundred years now and takes to having lengthy conversations with the bed about when it should and shouldn’t eat people.  At one point the picture-man calls the hungry bed a “foul jester.”  Yeah.

Anyway.

The bed and the picture-man live in a shed on the side of a rapidly decaying old mansion in the middle of the countryside (it of the nondescript variety).  The bed, as a result of its many criminal transgressions against the living (they of the non-box spring variety), has been kicked out of the main part of the house.  Apparently, a killer bed is something that draws the attention of both the press and the authorities.  Go figure.

Please, pay no mind to the fact that:

1. The name of the publication printing these stories is distractingly named “The Daily Bugle.”

2. That J.J. Jameson used the same picture/layout combo four times (there’s a 4th headline that I didn’t include here).

3. Some of the comedy in this movie may actually be intentional.  Simpsonian, even.

Listen, there’s a lot to hate about this movie, but you can’t not admire this film’s audacity (the second half of that sentence is, oddly enough, the title of Dave Eggers’ next book).  These people made a movie about a fucking killer bed.  A KILLER BED!  Hell, it’s a ridiculous idea, but it wasn’t so ridiculous that audiences weren’t freaked out by the same concept seven years later when Wes Craven sucked Johnny Depp ass-first into his sheets (their on set love affair was well documented at the time) in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’ve been struggling with this movie for a couple of days now in that I’ve been trying to figure out whether I can recommend it or not.  I still don’t know that I’ve come to a definite conclusion.  You see, on the one hand it’s Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.  And on the other hand, isn’t that why we’re talking about this movie in the first place—because someone made a movie about a killer bed that eats people, buckets of chicken, leg braces, a copy of Tropic of Cancer, multiple flowers, luggage and a bottle of Pepto-Bismal (among other things)?  If it weren’t for the title and the borderline retarded premise, would anyone give a fuck about this movie more than 30 years later?  There’s got to be something said for a film that, while constrained by budget and an altogether lack of talent in front of and behind the camera, still has something at its core that generates discussion.  Right?

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d rather see more Death Bed clones than the zombie movies, slashers and remakes that have gunked up the horror genre on the independent and mass market level in the past five years or so.  At least the people that made this film came up with an original idea (which is to say nothing of the quality of said idea) and at least the idea was ludicrous enough to have some staying power, if only for a select group of fringe cinephiles.

So let’s say this: if you want to see a movie that will never and should never be replicated, then check out Death Bed.  It’s unique and it is uniquely bad.  Fans of Nail Gun Massacre and Troll 2 will love it.  Plus, it features the actor who played Corey’s dad on the show Boy Meets World as the brother of one of the three girls who encounters the Death Bed.  He stabs the bed and subsequently has his hands skeletalized.  Neither he nor his sister react to this with any human emotion at all.  I think that sums the movie up nicely, actually.

There.  It’s done.  That took much longer than I thought it might, and I’m glad to have it out of my system.

Next up is probably going to be Hell’s Ground, which I promised would be next the last time I made similar such proclomations.  With that said, the next review will probably be of Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes.  Oh, and I’m finally going to get around to watching I Am Cuba, which I’m sure I’ll want to write about as well.  So there.