Death Bed - the Bed That Eats 2003 Horror Movie Review

Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (George Barry, 2003)


Less than ten minutes into George Barry’s Death Bed, which is arguably the single worst movie ever made, I was already nauseous. Not because of the terrible gore effects, but because I was laughing so very hard. And things only got worse—or better, depending on your perspective—from there. This is a movie so insanely awful that no one would release it for two decades after its completion, and according to the DVD extras, Barry seems to have even forgotten he made it (despite never having made another film; you’d think having completed one would stick in your mind, no?). But it is one of those movies that transcends the realms of the quotidian bad into something so entirely horrendous that it achieves a kind of greatness. It’s so bad that “bad” quails in fear at the mention of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. And rightly so.


Plot: there’s this bed, see. And it eats people.


Okay, there’s a bit more to it than that. The bed is in an abandoned mansion in the middle of nowhere, sitting in a room which also contains a painting haunted by the ghost of someone whom we’re not supposed to realize, I don’t think, is Aubrey Beardsley. The ghost hates the bed, though there are times when we’re supposed to think (I think) that the ghost is the spirit that inhabits the bed. In any case, there’s a long, dull, rather incomprehensible story, related by the ghost about two-thirds of the way through the film, about how the bed came to be a bed that eats people. Which it does, by the way, by secreting something that looks like orange soda over them and dissolving them. (It can do this with other things, too, which makes for some unintentionally hysterical moments; who knew that acid had such well-defined teeth when eating a fried chicken leg, for example?) Yes, folks, this is genius at work.


The acting, as is to be expected, is atrocious; I have no idea which gangster is which, but keep an ear on the guy with the mustache when he first notices there’s something strange about the bed. It’s probably the funniest line I’ve heard in a movie in weeks. Unintentionally, of course. I’ve never heard an expression of horror delivered in quite that deadpan before. The direction is similarly horrible. The effects? Orange soda, people. The script is brutal, the sound mix seems to have been accomplished with yards of cotton batting. There is nothing whatsoever to recommend this movie. And yet, somehow, if you start watching it, you will not be able to look away. You’ll wonder just how much worse it can get, and it will reward you every time. I can’t recommend this by any stretch of the imagination, and yet still, you’ve got to see it just to confirm that, yes, someone can spend five years making a movie and still have it come out looking, sounding, feeling, and tasting like Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. *