DEATH BED

When is a "lost" film not lost? George Barry had just about forgotten about the 16mm feature film he made in the 1970s until he found a review of it on the internet a couple years ago. Though Barry was unable to find a distributor willing to release his very odd horror film, apparently someone had a print of it stashed, and it leaked onto the bootleg market in Europe in the late '80s.

DEATH BED comes as a surprise to everyone that sees it, having something of the same strange quality that some of David Lynch's films have. As anyone who's seen Tobe Hooper's THE MANGLER can attest, surrounding a piece of furniture with menace is a tough proposition, but Barry pulls it off while adding a touch of whimsy. It's more a fairy tale than a traditional horror story. Somehow, the blood of a demon spawns another within a tree, and when the wood is used the build a bed, it's still infested with the demon spirit, and makes a snack out of whoever curls up on it. Though left in an remote and abandoned mansion for years, the house still draws in enough visitors to keep the Bed fed.

How do we know all this? The Bed keeps the ghost of one victim behind a portrait he made of the Bed, and he acts as narrator. His youthful face doesn't match the rich voice of Patrick Spence-Thomas on the soundtrack, but maybe his internal dialogue matured over the decades. However, the current group of houseguests a trio of young women on a weekend getaway presents a mystery, as runaway Sharon (Rosa Luxemburg) seems to be causing the Bed some anxiety. Will Sharon's brother (William Russ) be able to track down his AWOL sister before the Bed gets over whatever its troubles are?

In Barry's video introduction to the film, he unfortunately doesn't say much about the actual production of DEATH BED, which he worked on for five years, but he describes how he found that online review in excruciating detail. This is a perfect illustration of Barry's weaknesses as a storyteller there are some scenes that show us way too much of mundane events, but other parts of his story are confused and skimmed over. There's some stock footage and newspaper headlines that tell us that the Bed killed thousands during the Roaring Twenties, but we don't see much about how this happened. However, we get lots of footage of folks walking around the house grounds. It's the poor pacing that may have had something to do with so many distributors passing on it. Even at 77 minutes, the movie feels too slow, and it could use a bit of the outrageous spirit that has enlivened similar low budget films like Barry's fellow Michiganite Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD.

It could also use a Bruce Campbell. Most of the actors are pretty bland, and react to even the most horrific situations as if they're sleepwalking. William Russ may have gone on to a busy career in TV and movies, but here he's out-acted by his own monobrow.

However, that intro also shows Barry is a creative and witty man, and his film reflects that. There are some very funny bits in it, but also some memorable chills. The scene in which a woman tries to make a tortured escape after getting chewed on by the Bed is harrowing, while showing off what the narrator calls the Bed's "clumsy sadism". Indeed, Barry makes up for the victims' flatness by giving an inanimate object a full personality. It's kind of like THE BLOB in the form of a rather imposing king-size four poster hardwood monster, but more playful and sinister. Though not a gore film, DEATH BED has plenty of shots of objects and people engulfed in supernatural bile, as well as stuff floating in the yellow liquid within. At its best, DEATH BED is scary, funny and surreal all at once. It's a shame that George Barry wasn't able to build a career from it, and fittingly bizarre that we only get to see it as a result of someone stealing it from him.

We learn more about how this happened from the liner notes, but Cult Epics doesn't give us much else not even trailers for their other titles. This is disappointing, as DEATH BED is one of those mysterious films that begs for a full length director commentrak to pull together all the pieces of the puzzle.