movie review: DeathBed

First thing's first: this is not Death Bed: The Bed That Eats as made famous by stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt. No doubt taking advantage of pop-culture notariety, this is a cheaply made movie about a bed that inspires death rather than murders.

My roommate had heard Oswalt's routine about "the bed that eats people" and asked me to track it down. Only twenty minutes before our friends showed up for B-movie night did we realize that I'd netflixed the wrong film. Undeterred, we popped in DeathBed and were immediately amused by the laughable list of credits, seemingly a bunch with a history in the porn industry (ie. Meagan Mangum, Jonhy R. Long, Max Schlimm). Things don't get any less-erotic as the first half of the movie focuses on a couple's renting of a warehouse apartment and from there delves into their sexual frustrations. We get plenty of pillow talk and sleazy love making. It was like the last time I hosted and we ended up watching a movie that was basically softcore porn (see: Vixen movie review.) When stay-at-home-artist Karen hears screaming from a locked room at the top of a staircase, she invites the landlord over to pry the door open. When they discover a dust-covered brass bed, it's only logical that she'd want to clean it up and use it as a tool to bring some spice into her relationship.

So the warehouse has a history as the site of numerous murders in the 1920s which cause Karen to unexplainably create gruesome drawings. I'd try to sum up the plot further but the final twenty minutes of the movie are almost impossible to follow. What I can say for sure is that at one point the boyfriend, Jerry, gets possessed by an entity which grabs him through his reflection in a mirror, à la Evil Dead 2. You can't tell who's real and who's a ghost, but by this point in the movie, you just don't care. Too bad the cheesy gore payoff is kinda minimal. I haven't even seen the aforementioned "real" Death Bed, but I'm willing to bet that it would be a better waste of your time.