Death Bed opens with a black screen accompanied by the sounds of someone or something having a meal; a cacophony of bone-crunching noises. Then a title card appears - Breakfast - followed by our first view of the setting, a deserted mansion that houses an underground stone crypt. Inside the crypt is a large Victorian bed and on the wall an Audrey Beardsley illustration (behind which the soul of the actual painter is imprisoned). Then we meet the morning entree, two lovers looking for a place to have undisturbed sex. Drawn to the basement room by demonic powers, the couple soon climb into bed for some heavy petting, failing to notice that their lunch (two apples, fried chicken, a bottle of wine) placed on the bed beside them, is being consumed by something beneath the mattress. By the time they notice something is amiss, the bed strikes, devouring them. Despite the gruesome sound effects (agonized screams, loud, crunching sounds), the deaths are presented in a subtle manner; a shot of a writhing bare arm, a drop of blood falling onto a candle. This is not your typical exploitation film (gore hounds will be disappointed) and what follows is equally strange, humorous and unpredictable.
Death Bed is an indie film in the true sense of the word. Barry had no Hollywood industry connections and was only a struggling student filmmaker at Wayne State University when he began the project. He shot the film on 16mm outside Detroit at the Gar Wood Mansion using friends and local talent for the cast and crew. Although the initial shoot only lasted three weeks, Barry had to shoot additional footage (such as the climactic fire sequence) over the next two years (1973-74). But it was the editing process that proved to be so time-consuming, taking almost five years! Sure, the film's poverty row limitations are easy to spot - all the actors' dialogue was looped after filming and the tinted day for night scenes are subpar - but in some cases, this worked to Barry's advantage. Take, for instance, the special effects. Crude as they are, they seem perfectly right for the fable at hand. The yellow bubbling substance that oozes out of the bed to devour items is effectively icky but even better is the amber-colored acid blood inside the bed that transforms human bodies into skeletons; it even swallows a bottle of Pepto-Bismol at one point because some of the victims are extra spicy. The scene where one of the bed's potential victims stabs the mattress with a knife only to end up with fleshless hands prefigures the sort of macabre comedy that was so abundant in Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987). Even the clumsy attempts to reveal the true origins of the demonic bed through archival footage and spinning headlines have a goofy go-for-broke quality that seems like a parody of movie conventions. All in all, the final result is often quite transfixing and resembles an unholy marriage of black comedy, exploitation thriller, and art house import. In the excellent DVD liner notes by Stephen Thrower, Barry admits, "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."
Death Bed looks great on DVD considering that it was taken from Barry's 16mm answer print and was practically a lost film. The audio is clear and the colors are vibrant, except for some night scenes which are difficult to see clearly. Extra features include an introduction by George Barry who explains how Death Bed was rescued from certain obscurity and the aforementioned liner notes which include in-depth production notes on the film.
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by Jeff Stafford
