For a nice Friday post we’ll depart from our usual week-ending edition of my Cool-Named Team Of The Day to do a Bad Movie. It’s 1977’s Death Bed and it’s hilariously bad. It gets my highest rating, in fact. For more Bad Movies click here: https://glitternight.com/bad-movies/
DEATH BED – (1977) – Category: A neglected bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult following A bed that eats everyone who lies on it is the hilarious premise of this actual straight-faced attempt at a horror film. You know how water-beds have water in them? This living bed has digestive juices in it. Its victims are somehow sucked through the membraneous material of the mattress and are broken down and digested by those juices. The viewer is treated to countless shots of human bodies (plus for variety an apple, a fly and a bucket o’ chicken) dissolving in the acid, looking like they’re being torn apart by millions of tiny piranha fish.
If you’re wondering how a four-poster bed in an abandoned mansion became a living being with a taste for human flesh, we’re told a tree-demon (no relation to the tree-monster in From Hell It Came) temporarily incarnated as a human being to seduce a woman on the bed. At one point in the tale the blood-colored tears of the demon fell on the bed, thus creating our hungry, hungry hero.
Next, if you’re wondering who tells us this, well, it’s one of the bed’s victims from decades earlier, kept alive in some kind of vague supernatural half-life and imprisoned behind a painting on the wall of the bedroom our title creature is in. No, not in the painting, literally behind it, in a little cubby hole with the painting over it as a kind of door. Our narrator crouches in a scrunched-up position in his hidey-hole throughout the film.
He’s obviously just in an air vent so you expect to see Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard movie come crawling by at any moment. Our narrator speaks in a very stuffy, stilted way, as if he’s recounting a macabre tale worthy of Poe or Hoffmann but because of the ridiculous position he’s in and the even more ridiculous events in the film it just adds to the unintentional hilarity.
Other things to love in this wonderful lost bad movie epic include:
a) the effective Gothic feel of the creepy abandoned mansion juxtaposed with the monumentally absurd events unfolding on the screen …
b) the sheer number of victims the Death Bed feeds upon, making it seem like a pilot for a series in which each week a new group of victims would stumble across the abandoned house and fall prey to “The Evil Bed” (sorry). Seriously, across the decades that our monotoned narrator escorts us through we see dozens of people ending up as a meal for the bed …
c) the turn of the century “orgy” scene, with our title monster devouring everyone oinking and boinking on it …
d) the woman who is heard talking in one scene even though her lips aren’t moving (shades of Doris Wishman!) …
e) the way the Death Bed wraps its blankets like a tentacle around the ankle of one victim, preventing them from fleeing and dragging them back to it …
f) the on-the-lam gangster who tries shooting the bed as it swallows him up, with the angle of the shot making it look like he’s shooting himself in the crotch over and over again …
g) the character who stabs the bed with a knife, accidentally immersing his hands and the blade in the digestive juices inside the mattress. When he is able to pull his hands back out they’ve been reduced to nothing but bones, prompting him to, well, just silently look at them with a bland “How do you like that?” look on his face.
And on and on til the cheerfully confusing ending featuring a bizarre ritual designed to destroy the Death Bed. The whole convoluted proceeding plays like lost footage from one of the goofier Twin Peaks episodes. I have no idea how Michael Weldon missed this movie in his first two Psychotronic volumes.
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Hi Balladeer,
OMG!…how macrabe!” Stephen King’s mentality has strong competition. Your absract…”A neglected bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult following” compels me to ask…What is Plan 9? The title hooked me into reading the entire narrative.
You are extemely talented. Very creative writing!
Very interesting!!!
SassC’
Thank you very much, SassC’ ! Plan 9 is short for Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie by Ed Wood that is often used to embody everything loveable about poorly-made low-budget films. It’s a cult classic. Thanks for stopping by!
Wow. Sounds like a pretty screwy movie. Id watch it 😛
LOL Thanks for the comment! This film is truly one of a kind!
If Farah had done her movie before 1977, they could have just had her light the sucker on fire…
The burning death bed of demons…that bed would have gotten a good ass kickin
As for messed up movies, the Entity takes the cake for me….life is just full of weird shit
Thanks for commenting! Love “The Burning Bed” reference. I have to admit I wondered why nobody tried setting the Death Bed on fire when I watched it. I forgot all about The Entity! I haven’t seen that in years!
Too funny!!!!!!!!! u r the best! Funnier than that overrated jerk Mike Nelson and that hick Joe Bob Briggs!
Thank you for the kind words!
I thought I was an expert on bad films but I never heard of this one. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment and for stopping by!
You should do a tv show about bad movies. This was so funny!
Thanks! I appreciate that!!!!
This review made me laugh so hard!
Ha Thank you!
I luv luv luv ur movie reviews!
Thank you!
Never heard of this movie! How funny but creepy!
You said it!
Since the admin of this site is working, no uncertainty very rapidly it will be famous, due to its quality contents.
Thanks
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Hello there! This post could not be written any
better! Reading through this post reminds me of my good old
room mate! He always kept talking about this.
I will forward this page to him. Fairly certain he will have a good read.
Thank you for sharing!
Such a weird movie!
You said it!
This is one crazy movie.
I know exactly what you mean!
“I think this is a real great blog post.Really looking forward to read more. Fantastic.”