Cheap Death Bed - The Bed That Eats (DVD) (George Barry (III)) Price

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Customer Reviews of Death Bed - The Bed That Eats

The history of the bed is also fun to watch along with the characters who battle with the mattress monster.

Not big on gore, but good for the story and its weirdness.

The ending kept this from being a 5 star review, but this film is a good find, give it a chance.

The Strangest Bed-Time Story Ever Told!
I first saw Death Bed: The Bed That Eats in 1988: a friend discovered it whilst browsing at a cheap video sale and decided to spring the film on me. I was straight away smitten by its weird aura, and mystified too. Who on Earth made it? What was the director playing at? How did such a movie get made? Death Bed, with its cheesy cover and 'you're kidding me' title, was devoid of any credits, save for the words "(c) George Barry 1977." The mystery of Death Bed's origins was intensified as the film gathered momentum, from creepy comedy to poetic folk-tale to surreal horror: its mood ricocheted between registers in a way that defied categorisation, either as mind-warped outsider art, insane student project, or exploitation film gone berserk. There was a streak of comedy, but the film wasn't just a cheap laugh: instead there was a loose, wayward dreaminess which gave Death Bed an impact all its own. I remember thinking 'I must find out who made this!'. But no-one knew anything about Death Bed: the video label had disappeared, the name 'George Barry' was anonymous enough to belong to a hundred thousand Americans. And so the trail went cold...
In 2002 I began work on a book about maverick American directors and my desire to find out more about Death Bed was re-ignited. Through the auspices of film researcher Marc Morris and a British web-site, Lightsfade, I finally had the chance to talk to George Barry and hear the full Death Bed story...
George Barry was born in 1949 and raised in Royal Oak, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit where he still lives today. He began making films whilst studying at University, and in 1972 - after working on a few b/w 16mm shorts - he decided to go for broke with a colour 16mm feature film to be blown up for theatrical release. Using $10,000 of his own money he began filming Death Bed, a project that would eventually span five years and cost around $30,000. Barry decided to weave his story around a dream he'd had - about an engulfing, possibly carnivorous bed...
With cameraman Robert Fresco, he headed for the Gar Wood Mansion outside Detroit, commencing the shoot in late Spring 1972. The core of the movie was then filmed over three weeks in the spring and summer. Assembled during 1976 by experienced Detroit TV editor Ron Medico, Death Bed's 16mm answer print was finally struck in '77.
Unfortunately, Barry's problems were only just beginning. Over the next few years he travelled to L.A. and New York several times, making the rounds of the small distributors. But with slasher films on the rise, Death Bed was always going to be a hard sell. Those who did show interest were put off by the blow-up costs, or were offering virtually no return for Barry's investment.
The next convolution in the Death Bed saga would lead to the film at last reaching a few devoted fans: although it all came as a great surprise to Barry himself. In the early 1980s he'd sent the answer print, which was still without credits at the time, to a small LA company interested in obtaining video rights. He was offered $1000 for a finished video master. But Barry was chronically short of cash and unable to shoot the missing credits. Time passed, and the answer print was eventually returned.
What he didn't know was that the 'interested party' had pirated a copy of Death Bed before sending it back. It was this version that snuck out onto tape in Great Britain in the late-1980s, on the supremely obscure 'Portland' label.
Those who did notice it were tuned not to the noisy gore frequencies of the "video-nasties" but to a stranger, more elusive bandwidth. Death Bed isn't a gorehound movie - viewers are required to spin their mental wireless to the space between stations, where the shipping forecasts, foreign signals and dream-voices live.
In 2002, Daniel Craddock of the British website Lightsfade published an on-line review of the film, which at last alerted its director to the existence of the pirated version.

"Death Bed came from a dream and, to begin with, I wrote the story as more a fairy tale than a horror film. We shot the story as possibly more horror film than fairy tale, then in the editing process Death Bed tried to return to its fairy tale origins." - Barry
The best movies leave something elusive behind, a lingering haze that drifts through the mind like Haven Gillespie's "haunting refrain": a special something that seems to dance out of reach when you look directly. There are skilled directors whose work, for all its craft, will never possess this quality, which is a dream quality and far from common. Other films are steeped in this strange pleasure, even when their conventional limitations are readily obvious. It's in this way that a cheaply produced film, made at the very fringes of the industry, can stay with you after a major production has hurried faceless out of your memory.
The lines crossed by Death Bed are an index of its quality. Set in the twilight between certainties - between comedy and horror, art and artless, mundane and insane - it draws on energies lost to more sensible films.
"People not only forget their dreams, they often forget *about* their dreams. They forget about the process of dreaming.", says Barry. If this is true, how great it is to see this DVD release, a dream thought lost and forgotten, now magically recalled in miraculous detail. Here's to the unique and lingering spell of Death Bed!

Stephen Thrower (this is a condensed extract from my forthcoming book Nightmare, USA, in preparation from FAB Press).

Surpisingly Good
I watched this film expecting something silly, but it turned out to be a very accomplished film. Taking a very bizarre concept (a bed that eats people), the director has managed to make a film filled with David Lynchesque surrealism that is equally intentionally humourous and frightening. The effects showing how the bed eats are very well done.

The movie (largely seen through the eyes of the ghost of Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde's favourite illustrator) is divided into three sections: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. The first part sets up the fact that the bed eats people as a couple stumble upon it. The second part, also taking place in the "present" shows another group of friends coming upon the bed. Scenes of these new visitors falling victim to it one at a time are intercut with scenes of the bed's history and its origins. The bed, despite its immobility, manages to kill each victim with far more imagaination than the average movie serial killer. The third section deals with the final fates of the bed and the film's heroes.

Unfortunately, after watching the film once, all the surprises are gone, and the dreamlike pacing of it then becomes a negative instead of a positive. Despite this, I have no hesitation in recommending that this film be watched at least once.

The extras include the director explaining how this film became "lost", illustrating how dirty the film distribution business can be. If he had been able to release it in the early 1970s like he intended, this film would have been a classic, instead of something seen by only a few people with access to pirated copies.