(Director/screenwriter: George Barry)
DEATH, whose idea came to director/screenwriter George Barry in a dream, is appropriately surrealistic and unique. In it, a demon possesses a four-poster bed after his true love dies on it. He continues eating people (via the bed’s hellish ability to transform from a regular bed to a bed-framed, yellow-lit vat of digestive acid). Various people break into the abandoned mansion where the bed is and most of them are consumed by the bed. These devourings are punctuated, sometimes narrated by, The Artist, whose spirit is trapped within/behind a painting, tells viewers about the bed’s history, intermingled with his. DEATH is broken into four segments: Breakfast; Lunch; Dinner; and The Just Desert.
After one of the victims, Sharon, becomes a meal for the demon, "Sharon's Brother" (William Russ, billed as Rusty Russ) comes looking for her. One of the most hilarious scenes of this low-budget, dark-humored and slow-moving film involves the brother and skeletal hands.
DEATH is not a good movie by most standards: its narration takes the viewer out of the movie, as do the interior monologues of several characters; there are padded scenes, lots of lag time.
What makes DEATH worthwhile (for intriguing bad flick enthusiasts) is how Barry makes the most of his limited budget, creating an out-there, artsy work (especially during the intensely yellow-bright scenes where the bed dissolves its victims). What also works is Barry’s intuitive jump cut edits, which add to the natural, odd feel of this standout cult classic, which was started in 1972, but not widely released until 2003 on DVD.
According to IMDb, DEATH was mostly filmed in “Gar Wood mansion on Keelson Island in Detroit[, Michigan].” This setting is gloomy and Gothic, furthering the mood of the flick which mostly eschews a soundtrack. Love it or hate it, you're not likely to forget it. Danny Draven's loose remake, DEATHBED, was released direct-to-DVD on September 24, 2002.
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