October Horror Challenge 2017 #97: "Deathbed (1977)"

Last year I watched a movie called "Death Bed," and the one I watched was a movie I'd read about in an article in Fangoria magazine sometime around the year 2000 or so. The movie I saw wasn't the greatest movie ever made, but it was fun. I'd heard of another movie though, one also called "Deathbed," and it was supposed to be a lost horror film, a crazy surrealist horrir film that sounded a lot better than the movie I saw. I was intrigued, so I put that movie on my list of those I definitely had to watch, and now I'm finally getting a chance to check it out.

Apparently this movie is actually known by it's full title "Deathbed: the bed  that Eats," and it's about a cursed bed that contains the spirit of a demon that lures people to it, convinces them to have sex in it, and then eats them. The bed sits abandoned on the edge of a crumbling estate that was once grand and beautiful. People who are dumb enough to have sex in a mysterious bed in a crumbling, abandoned mansion pretty much deserve what they get, and it's not like we really get to know any of the characters well enough to care much about them.

There's some pretty cool gore here. A lot of it is the "red paint splashed on people" style of special effects, but it's also cool seeing people get sucked into the bed and eaten. I can definitely see what they mean when they call this movie "surreal." There's  voiceover narration throughout most of the film, provided by another soul trapped inside a painting (don't ask, I'm not sure I understand it either) and there's lots of disjointed music and dreamlike imagery that gives the movie a nightmarish quality.

The movie is definitely creepy, but it was hard for me to look away from the screen, even though I wasn't sure if ever knew what was going on, so the filmmakers must have done something right. I can't really recommend this movie except to weird people like me, but if you enjoy strange movies that don't make much sense and give you a headache while at the same time hypnotized you so you can't look away, this movie is for you!