Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977) Review

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977) Review

Wow. 

What can I say about this one? 

Someone took the concept of a deathbed (you know, the place where you die?) a little too seriously, methinks. It’s a bed, that eats people. W.T.F. 

I’ll explain the whole thing as best I can. There was a demon, who wanted to make love to a woman, so he conjured up this real nice bed, but then the woman died and the demon was sad, so he cried tears of blood, which got on the bed and brought the bed to life. So the bed (which is actually a demon) is in an old rundown house, and for some reason, there was one time where a guy almost got eaten by the bed but the bed instead trapped him inside a painting on the wall, so this dude is stuck in there and has to watch the bed feed every time people show up to have sex on it, which is pretty often, apparently—I mean, who doesn’t want to just come in to a random rundown house and do that? 

And there you have the majority of Death Bed. It’s about people coming in to the room, having sex on the bed, or sometimes just taking an innocent nap on it, and the bed consuming them and digesting the people in its acidic stomach which resides just under the covers. The story (if it that term even applies here) is divided into segments, appropriately given the title cards “Breakfast”, “Lunch”, “Dinner”, and “Just Desserts”. 

Toward the end, a guy and a girl try to kill the bed, but the bed digests the flesh on the guy’s hands, leaving just skeletal fingers, so then they use his finger bones to get a fire going so they can perform a ritual to destroy the bed, but the bed gets teleported outside, the guy and girl die, then the bed bursts into flames and the movie ends. 

It sounds like a fever dream. This probably was producer/writer/director George Barry’s fever dream. Or maybe he did a lot of drugs. Whatever his deal was, this is the only movie he ever made, and for years, it was a “lost film”, eventually being released on DVD in 2004. Allegedly, Barry “forgot” he made it. 

How could you possibly forget making this insane master-disaster-piece?

Honestly, some of the imagery here is disturbing. A monolithic black bed out in the woods? If I saw that in real life, I’d think something was up. But mostly, the movie is boring. There are long shots of nothing, the production value is super low, and it’s sleazy A.F., but when it comes to the moments of the bed feeding, or any of the other weird things that happen, it’s so bizarre it’s either laughable or hypnotically confusing. I’m still unsure if what I saw can even be considered a real movie or not. It’s more like a motion picture experiment.   

I don’t think there’s anything else to say about Death Bed: The Bed That Eats except a final WTF. If you want to hear more about this thing, actor Patton Oswalt has discussed it in-depth in his comedy routines.