SHITTY FLICKS: DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

A movie should not be judged by its synopsis. Despite how absurd any particular scenario for a film might sound in the very early scripting stages, the majority of these odd-sounding concepts usually become fantastic cinema. Spell out the basics of some of your favorite films and you’ll see that I’m right.

Man dresses up as giant bat and chases a clown. Sounds dumb, doesn’t it? But that’s Batman, friends, and it’s awesome.

Guy from Moonlighting with no shoes kills entire team of terrorists led by Alan Rickman: Die Hard.

Group of forty-somethings own “ghost busting business” and they make a lot of money because New York has so many ghosts in it and at the end they fight a giant man made of marshmallow: Xanadu.

The point is this: “a bed that eats people” is one of those wonderful concepts that gave birth to an even wonderfuller movie (in the bad way). All you need to know about the plot of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is in its title.

GEORGE BARRY: THE BARRY WHO MURDERS CINEMA

The movie was written, directed and shat out by George Barry in 1972, assembled in 1977, and then forgotten about soon after. Seriously, the man who wrote, directed, shot, edited and solicited the tale of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats literally forgot the movie existed, or at least claims to.

Because no company wanted to touch a movie like this with a ten-foot death bed, nor spend the money to blow it up from its current size of 16mm to 35mm (the standard exhibition size), the movie languished in a tin can for years. Eventually a print of it somehow leaked and became an extremely popular bootlegged item in foreign territories. George Barry stumbled across this information a few years back, said, “Nice! I MADE this!” and got the movie released on a cult DVD label in 2003, more than thirty years after the movie was shot.

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats regales the audience with the story of The Bed, an old bed that resides in an abandoned mansion and whose only companionship comes in the form of a forlorn ghost who is trapped in a painting and provides us with exposition in the form of morose narration. Turns out this man was an artist who had grown very sick many moons ago, and as he was lying in The Bed, he painted it, since he would most likely die in it. Then The Bed ate him, transporting his soul (somehow) to the painting. The same thing happened to Bob Ross, who died years ago and is now stuck in a boring painting of a grey mountain.

Every once in a while, a group of travelers will enter the abandoned mansion in which this bed resides, usually end up lying on the bed for a nap or for a bit of the sex, and end up getting sucked into The Bed’s inner goo, which looks like a fish tank filled with piss. Once you get sucked into The Bed, you end up in said tank where you moan and writhe until you succumb to the piss and it turns you into a grinning store-bought skeleton. 

That’s…pretty much it.

“Why would you even watch this movie?”

Hey, fuck you.

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is told in four parts: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and The Just Desserts. I’m not even kidding; there are title cards and everything.

The movie begins with roughly 30 seconds of complete black, complemented by munching and chewing sounds. So, not even 30 seconds into the movie, you’re already saying, “what the fuck is this?” 

We then meet Breakfast: a young hippie couple going on some sort of picnic…on the bed.

The two unveil their meal fit for kings: two apples, a bottle of wine and a bucket of fried chicken.

“I’m hungry!” cries the girl. No time for food, though, as these two have some serious heavy petting to do. They kiss and hug, and while in their awkward embrace, The Bed licks its bed lips and prepares for its first meal in a long time (in bed years).

The Bed starts off its meal with an appetizer and expels orange foam (Bed Tongue) over the picnic food brought by the couple and sucks it down into its gooey piss goo; first the apples, then the chicken, and finally completing its free meal with the bottle of wine. And yes, despite the fact that this movie isn’t trying to be funny, the bed burps. Not only that, it also makes slurping noises when eating and drinking, and it even laughs sometimes. At one point, it even downs a bottle of Pepto Bismol, but no—we’re still not kidding around here—we’re dead serious.

Ohhh, mmm, the couple, now in their extreme height of animal passion, wants to eat some cold chicken before going back to their dry humping and finger banging. But instead of putting their hands into a bucket of cold greasy chicken, they grab only a handful of bones and apple cores.

Hey, how’d that happen?

Hey, do you care?

Because they don’t, and they go right back to kissing.

But wait, isn't spontaneous consumption suspicious?

Well, see, the boyfriend states, “Must’ve been a mistake.”

Right? It happens. I’ve ordered chicken before and gotten generic sitcom garbage.

“Oh well, I’m not hungry anyway!” cries the same girl that cried she was hungry seriously 20 seconds ago. The Bed then closes its bed curtains of doom and the couple screams as they may or may not be eaten. Who really remembers at this point? I watch shit like this for fun, and you can’t tell me it doesn’t fuck holes in my brain.

The Apple's dream of being in a guy-girl threesome
was about to be ruined by some premature ejaculatory foam.

Throughout the movie, the painting ghost will go on to unfold the origins of The Bed, and the needlessly complicated history adds a bit of charm to this wonderful story of The Bed of Death. A long time ago, an unexplained, intangible spirit of the earth fell in love with a human woman and it constructed this bed in hopes of making love to her with its spirit cock. However, the Supreme Court of the Spirits ruled this sort of union un-Spirit in definition, and the union was destroyed after the woman was killed. The spirit cursed the bed, creating The Bed, and fled, checking himself into Spirit Rehab for depression, aka the surrounding woods of the house. And thus The Bed has been sitting ever since, waiting to snack on some delicious asshole.

Later, a carload of young gals pulls up alongside the titular bed's house, which is inside and patiently waiting for some road-weary travelers to plant their butt on its shockingly clean sheets so it can “tap that ass” directly into its bed mouth.

When the car first pulls up, there are definitely only two people within, but thanks to some sloppy editing, a third suddenly appears in the back seat. Or perhaps I’m just mistaken. I’m sure the man who wrote Death Bed knows what he’s doing.

These three girls—Diane, Sharon and Susan—will serve as the crux of the story. While the plot will meander like Pulp Fiction and tell the tale of the bed from different time periods, we eventually return to our women to see what’s the deali-o.

Susan decides to sleep in The Bed while Sharon and Diane wander the grounds and have a lesbian picnic of highly suggestive foods like sausage and large pickles. Hopefully they saved Susan some food, because she’s going to be hungry when she wakes up from her nap. Oh wait, no she won’t, because The Bed methodically undresses the girl and eats her after she inexplicably dreams of her two companions feeding her a plate of bugs.

Jeff stared in disgust at the receipt, seeing he had been
overcharged during his recent trip to Big Stuff For Tiny Doll People.

We then take a break and we meet Dinner, my favorite characters in the film. They consist of three awesomely, 70s fashions-dressed men and their whore companion. Whore goes to The Bed immediately with one of the men and they get eaten.

Later, the other two men play cards and wear incredibly fake looking mustaches…on THE BED! At one point, The Bed attempts to bite the mustachioed man on his caboose, so he takes out his gun and fires shots into The Bed. And by shooting, I mean that he literally just holds the gun, figuring that the “pop” sound effect will be added later, so he doesn’t even attempt to mime the motion of the bullet’s expulsion.

Back to Lunch, Sharon and Diane are unable to find Susan, so they assume she has run off to be by herself. Sharon decides to go looking for Susan while Diane plans to get into The Bed for a nap. And nap she does—TO DEATH. She awakens from another laughably abstract dream to see that The Bed has begun swallowing her legs, and probably making icky sucking sounds.

Diane pulls herself free somehow and hurtles herself to the floor, and for the next 10-15 minutes, we’re forced to watch her slowly, slowly, slowly pull herself across the floor towards the door. Luckily her escape takes so fucking long that Sharon, back from searching for Susan, hears her cries and attempts to help. As the audience breathes a heavy sigh of relief, knowing Diane is safe, The Bed whips a sheet at her leg, encircling around her like a creepy uncle’s hand at Christmastime, and eats her black ass. Sharon’s valiant attempt to pull her friend out of The Bed’s grasp results only in yanking off Diane’s goddamned finger, somehow. Just as Sharon is also about to meet her bed fate, The Bed associates her beauty with that of the woman the Spirit loved so many years ago and it spares her. And just in time, too, because Sharon’s brother, who is not given a name in the movie, shows up for no reason.

After listening to Sharon’s outlandish tales of The Bed, the brother takes out his knife and stabs The Bed. Wrong move to make, Guy Who Looks Like Tim Robbins In Jacob’s Ladder, as The Bed spews forth a fine lather of Bed Goo and the man’s hands are instantly eaten, relegating him to calmly wave his brand new skeleton hands in front of his face as he looks on with a certain dreamlike awe and blandly states, “there’s no flesh.”

Tim Robbins had dropped acid plenty of times before,
but it was never like this...never like this...

(TRIVIA! While watching Brother wave his bone hands in front of his face, this will give you time to recognize this man that you grew up watching. That’s right! Corey’s dad from "Boy Meets World"!)

Brother asks Sharon if she could do him a solid—if she could wrench his skeletal hands free from his body and throw them in the roaring fireplace. She complies, because why not?

The trapped painting ghost finally decides to be of some use and tells Sharon how she can defeat The Bed. Sharon, who resembles the dead chick that The Bed loved, has to kill herself, which would, for unknown reasons, resurrect The Bed’s great love. So, after dragging Corey’s Dad to a field, she offs herself, resurrecting the girl that looks like her. Recently Resurrected Lost Love of The Bed begins to inexplicably fuck Corey’s dad in the middle of this field and The Bed gets so depressed that it burns itself to bed death. And thank Christ, because the narrator is finally freed from his painting prison, as if that was ever anyone’s concern to begin with.

So everyone wins, really.

Sharon is dead.

Diane is dead.

Susan is dead.

I guess Corey’s Dad is alright, although he’ll be forced to live out the rest of his life with no hands—but he’ll have an amazing story to drunkenly tell at the bar until he gets his ass handed to him for shattering all the expensive beer steins with his metal claws.

SOMETHING WRONG

"If you're wise, you'll run, dear, run... because to stay will mean worse than your death."

PILLIGA PRINCESS

She was a recluse, old, grey haired and crazy, and they dubbed her the Pilliga Princess. She became quite well known, but one night she was hit and killed by a truck. The trucker who hit her said she had been wandering across the road and he hadn’t seen her until it was too late. He told how as she was lit by the headlights, she turned to look directly at him and ran toward him, arms outstretched. The last thing he saw of her alive was the white hair flaring out around her wild-eyed face and the expression was one of manic glee.

Many other truckers since then claim they have seen her walking her trolley at night, just as she had done for years before she was killed. One truck driver even claimed to have hit her trolley, but with no Princess in sight.

Listen to a very unnerving (and Australian) eyewitness account.
 
Text source.

CREEP

I was young, perhaps six, but definitely less than ten. Even at the age of six, I slept in a crib because my family was poor and my father was slowly building me a shoddy bed frame at the time. I remember trying to sleep and my hand was poking out of the bars of the crib. And I was half asleep - in that weird state where you're aware that you've dozed off. Then I felt and heard what could have been the most terrifying thing imaginable. I felt something grabbing my index finger on the hand poking out of the bars. And I heard a conversation between whatever it was that was holding my finger and its friend. They said something to the effect of, "See, how nice it looks and feels? It's growing." And I heard cackling. And while this was happening I made certain to keep my eyes shut and I held my breath. Then I felt my finger released from the grip of whatever it was.

Story Source.

Image Source.

THE REAL SILENT HILL

“This was a world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn's. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers." 

Centralia is a borough and ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 12 in 2005,  9 in 2007, and 10 in 2010, as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia is one of the least-populated municipalities in Pennsylvania.

There is some disagreement over the specific event which triggered the fire. David DeKok, after studying available local and state government documents and interviewing former borough council members, argues in Unseen Danger and its successor edition, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, that in May 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip-mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. On May 27, 1962, the firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for some time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed opening in the pit allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia.

Joan Quigley argues in her 2007 book, The Day the Earth Caved In, that the fire had in fact started the previous day, when a trash hauler dumped hot ash and/or coal discarded from coal burners into the open trash pit. She noted that borough council minutes from June 4, 1962 referred to two fires at the dump, and that five firefighters had submitted bills for "fighting the fire at the landfill area." The borough, by law, was responsible for installing a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer, but fell behind schedule, leaving the barrier partly incomplete. This allowed the hot coals to penetrate the vein of coal underneath the pit and light the subsequent subterranean fire. In addition to the council minutes, Quigley cites "interviews with volunteer firemen, the former fire chief, borough officials, and several eyewitnesses" as her sources for this explanation of the fire. Another theory of note is the Bast Theory. It states that the fire was burning long before the alleged trash dump fire. However, due to overwhelmingly contrary evidence, few hold this position, and it is given little credibility.

However it started, it is agreed that the fire remained burning underground and spread through a hole in the rock pit into the abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 

In 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner and then mayor, John Coddington, inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12-year-old resident Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard. Only the quick work of his cousin, 14-year-old Eric Wolfgang, in pulling Todd out of the hole saved Todd's life, as the plume of hot steam billowing from the hole was measured as containing a lethal level of carbon monoxide.

In 1984, the U.S. Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. A few families opted to stay despite warnings from Pennsylvania officials.

In 1992, Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents to have the decision reversed failed. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service revoked Centralia's ZIP code, 17927. In 2009, Governor Ed Rendell began the formal eviction of Centralia residents

The Centralia mine fire extended into the town of Byrnesville, Pennsylvania and caused this town to become extinct also.

Very few homes remain standing in Centralia; most of the abandoned buildings have been demolished by the Columbia County Redevelopment Authority or nature. At a casual glance, the area now appears to be a field with many paved streets running through it. Some areas are being filled with new-growth forest.

The only indications of the fire, which underlies some 400 acres (1.6 km2) spreading along four fronts, are low round metal steam vents in the south of the borough and several signs warning of underground fire, unstable ground, and carbon monoxide. Additional smoke and steam can be seen coming from an abandoned portion of Pennsylvania Route 61, the area just behind the hilltop cemetery, and other cracks in the ground scattered about the area.

Source.

DEAD WALK

In times past, when the villages of Tana Toraja were still extremely isolated and difficult to visit, it is said that certain people had the power to make a dead man walk to his village in order to be present at his own funeral. In this way, relatives of the deceased were spared the necessity of having to carry his corpse. One particular area, Mamasa-West Toraja, was particularly well known for this practice…

According to the belief system of the people of Mamasa, the spirit of a dead person must return to his village of origin. It is essential that he meet with his relatives, so that they can guide him on his journey into the afterlife after the ceremonies have been completed. In the past, people of this area were frightened to journey far, in case they died while they were away and were unable to return to their village. If someone died while on a journey, and unless he has a strong magic power, it would be necessary to procure the services of an expert, to guide the dead person back to the village.

This is not intended metaphorically—the dead person would be made to walk from wherever he had journeyed back home, no matter how far away that was. The corpse would walk stiffly, without any expression on his face, in the manner of a robot. If anyone addressed the dead man directly, he would fall down senseless, unable to continue his journey. Therefore, those accompanying the deceased on the macabre procession had to warn people they met on their path not to talk directly to the dead man. The attendants usually sought out quiet paths where the procession was less likely to meet with strangers…

Source.

REVIEW: AEGRI SOMNIA

 

Films like Aegri Somnia, tales of nightmarish figures and landscapes as experienced through the eyes of our "unreliable" lead character, date back as far as 1920 with the German silent film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And since then we have seen plenty films about folks traversing their own personal hell and madness only to reach that inevitable conclusion where it turns out they are either dead, insane, in hell, or all of the above! 1990’s Jacob’s Ladder might just be the definitive take on the concept, and seems to have heavily inspired writer/director James Rewucki to make Aegri Somnia, whose title translates to “a sick man’s dreams.”

Edgar (Tyhr Trubiak) lives a miserable life. And who wouldn’t be miserable when everything’s in black and white? (Jokes!) He works a miserable job, goes home to a miserable and hateful wife, and can barely speak in full sentences without inserting Obama-like 20-second pauses in between his words. On one particular day, after a spat with his wife, she goes into the bathroom and takes her own life. This event will propel him into his self-imprisoned world of madness and guilt, where walking nightmares come to life and taunt him from dark corners. These brief trips into his subconscious begin to escalate, leading him to a very dark and dangerous revelation.

Along with Jacob’s Ladder, Aegri Somnia owes an awful lot to David Lynch’s 1977 oddity Eraserhead. From the black and white landscape to the introverted lead character to the deluge of pregnant pauses, Aegri Somnia is very much a spiritual reinterpretation of what might be one of the oddest but most accessible of Lynch's surreal repertoire. But Aegri Somnia also exists in a post-1980s world, featuring very familiar yet somehow unique-feeling set pieces and creatures. Dark-cloaked, rag-covered, and barbwire-encircled monsters whisper into Edgar’s ears and very much recall Clive Barker’s collection of demonic angels from his Hellraiser stories. And they jitter, chatter, and move unnaturally like the things following Tim Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder. Eerie images of bloody bathtubs and things in your periphery vision are the stuff of Freddy Krueger. It’s an interesting, engaging, creepy, yet flawed hodgepodge of horror cinema. 

By the time the ending happens, you can’t help but say, “no shit,” but much like the recent Shutter Island, the film isn’t so much about the ending as it is the journey. And it’s about our damaged character realizing what we as the audience already have a sneaking suspicion about: that he’s obscenity-screaming, Tom-Cruise-grinning insane.

*

While Aegri Somnia never manages to consistently capture the viewer from the first frame to the last (which can be fully attributed to the need for one more tightening pass in the editing room rather than a failure to tell a story), I must give all the credit in the world to writer/director James Rewucki. What he was able to accomplish on what must have been a very modest budget is an immediate cause for praise, regardless of the film’s overall success. It is a quiet film about quiet madness, and because of this the film will lose audiences more attuned to dripping monsters, whipping chains, and bloody murder. In fact, I can see most audiences downright hating it. Generally I am a big fan of films that try to bestow upon its audience the same feeling of insanity or hell that its characters are experiencing. Like Silent Hill, or The Cell before it, where the films lacked in strong stories or central characters it made up with fantastic visuals, and at the very least affects on a visceral level, if not on an emotional one. Aegri Somnia very much belongs in that category. It really does feel like a nightmare, and the visuals it contains are some of the most impressive I’ve seen within the low-budget horror world. (*And as an aside, the scene where Edgar buries his wife is shot fucking beautifully.)

While it's easy for abstract filmmakers to be labeled as pretentious simply because they want to present their film in an out-of-the-box manner, I do find Rewucki's choice to alternate sequences in black and white as well as color, along with the creatures' propensity for randomly whispering lines from T.S. Eliott, a little dubious. I'm sure Rewucki had a reason for doing both (you could make the argument that the creatures which haunt Edgar are the "hollow men" of which Eliot wrote, but if so, what's the significance of that poem to him in the first place?), but I just don't understand what that point was. And claims of pretension are caused not by abstract expression, but when there seems to be no rhyme or reason to utilize the tactic; and so the danger of Rewucki being labeled as such becomes dangerously close to being a fair criticism.

Regardless of my ultimate reaction to the film, I’ve been thinking about it off-and-on for the last three days. Filmmakers consider such a reaction to be a strength, whether that reaction be overwhelmingly positive or negative. Three days ago I had decided Aegri Somnia wasn't a film I ever had to see again, but the more I think about it, the more infectious the desire to revisit Edgar's nightmarish world is becoming.