Satanic Request: Bed of the Dead

The title of this movie alone required me to watch and review it. This was not a request from a reader. This was a request from on high. Then, after about 5 minutes, I realized I was clearly hearing the voice of the devil.

I can’t call this movie bad. I would have to be more certain about what the last 80-ish minutes entailed for me to call it bad. This movie defies traditional good and bad, like one of the Great Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft. It’s just a giant confusing waste of time. The fact that this was apparently from people who had made a previous film is shocking.

Rather than subject any of you to this movie, I have decided to post images of better horror movies.

SUMMARY

Alright, so, the opening of the movie shows that there’s a tree that people get hanged on as part of… a ritual of some sort. Or just an execution. It’s tough to tell. Since there’s some stuff about punishment later, I guess that it’s supposed to be an execution, but that’s still not for sure. Whatever, people get hanged on it. Then, someone cuts it down and makes a bed out of it. That’s the Bed of the Dead.

The Bed somehow ends up at the “Anarchist’s Sex Club” in the present day. We’re told that a group of people died there, and the room was burned up, including the Bed. It then flashes back to the group coming in, who are a pair of couples having a foursome for one of their birthdays. They convince the woman at the front to rent the room with the Bed, even though it apparently was just the site of a murder a few weeks before.

The foursome gets on the bed, then one of them sees a scary face on the other and calls the sex off. Which seems to be kinda what everyone wanted, since this group never seemed to want to do anything sexual. There’s also a weird moment of a woman walking down the sex club hall in slo-mo that’s unrelated to the rest of the movie. I still don’t understand this, except that it gives us the only nudity in a movie that takes place at a SEX CLUB. I’m not saying you need nudity to justify a terrible horror movie’s existence, but I’m saying exactly that.

So, the four go to bed, then one of the guys gets up after seeing his dog at the door. He is then dragged by an invisible dog under the bed and killed violently. The other three decide not to get off the bed because they hear something under it.

Cut to the present, and the owner of the club clearly knows about the bed, and barges in on the police investigation. He’s arrested for being a douche.

Back to the remaining three. One of the guys is shown a hallucination of the girls gone, and a shape made out of bloody sheets attacks him. He gets off the bed, at which point he is killed by having a bloody sheet spider burst out of him. It doesn’t make a ton of sense in context either. The two girls are now covered in blood, but stay on the bed. A guy from the hallway decides to come into the room, and the bed shows him visions of the two girls begging him for sex, then it pushes him into the hallway and kills him. He touches the bed, which is apparently enough to justify dying, but you can be shown a hallucination without touching it. This movie has no real rules.

Okay, now, one of the girls manages to get her phone, and she texts her mother, but the text goes to the policeman in the future. They start texting back and forth, and it’s shown that if they change something in the past, it changes the present… but only in the present. Like, one of the girls carves her name in the bed, and the guy sees the carving appear letter by letter. If you’ve seen “The Lake House” or “Looper,” well, I’m sorry you had to sit through those movies, but it’s like that.

In the present, the officer, despite the supernatural stuff happening, doesn’t appear to be really doing anything. He takes a nap at one point. Also, he snorts coke and drinks, because he shot a kid, and somehow lost his daughter.

Back in the past, the girls are trying to sleep, until one of the girls is told by the officer that she’s dead in the future. The movie starts to imply that the Bed is punishing people for someone they killed, but… one guy just had a dead dog. Like, he seemed super happy to see the dog, so I don’t get the feeling he killed it. Does having a dog die in your lifetime count? Because that seems like a really weird bar. The second guy killed a kid in a DUI. The first woman is revealed to have killed her mother after she forced her to have an abortion. The last one feels guilty because she survived a school shooting after a guy took a bullet for her.

The woman who killed her mom decides everything is in her head, so she tries to leave and the other woman knocks her out to save her. MomKiller gets back up after a while and gets off the Bed, before dying quickly with little fanfare.

The officer goes to meet a woman who was accused of murdering her husband on the Bed, but she reveals that he plucked his own eyes out. She was spared, supposedly because she was “innocent.” Also, what kind of forensics can’t tell that someone pulled their own eyes out? The officer calls the remaining girl, who now is planning on setting the Bed on fire, killing herself, but destroying it. He tells her that if she kills herself, the bed gets to take her soul, something that he HAS NO WAY OF ACTUALLY KNOWING. So, she chooses not to burn the Bed, and apparently leaves the club… or maybe doesn’t? She was seeing hallucinations, so maybe she’s dead.

The Bed, now having changed the past, is re-made whole in the present, and then the officer gets a call from his partner, who is in the room the next day, with the officer’s corpse on the Bed. The officer realizes that he touched the Bed in the alternate timeline, and therefore has to die, so he shoots himself. The Bed is then sold at a police auction.

Then, the credits begin, and the first credit is a typo. That pretty much says all that the movie needed to tell you.

END SUMMARY

This movie isn’t scary enough to be a horror movie, isn’t thrilling enough to be a thriller, isn’t gory enough to be gore porn, isn’t camp enough to be campy, and isn’t self-aware enough to be a parody. It’s basically just a weird set of ideas mashed together in a way that says “direct to VHS.”

The Bed killing people seems inconsistent, since, of the people killed, we don’t really see why some of them deserved to die. Most of them see some version of the person they killed before they get off the bed, and that kind of explains a little, but, one of them saw his dead dog and DID NOT INDICATE ANY KIND OF GUILT. He’s happy to see the dog, like a childhood pet you lost. Then, he’s brutally torn apart. Did he kill the dog? The revenge death would indicate that, even if nothing else does, but does that mean that anything anyone kills, even animals, can kill you? Because then you’re always just going to die unless you’re Buddha.

And the movie really keeps trying to pretend that there are rules, even though there very clearly are no useful rules to anything. Then, it decides to amp everything up by having the officer investigating the murder talking to the victims who are in the past. The movie tries to at least imply this is because the one girl is innocent, or at least it’s because the bed is trying to prevent itself from being destroyed by her, but then, at the end, the officer talks to the person investigating his own murder, and neither of those things apply, so apparently everything is just “if we feel like it.”

Also, at the end of the movie, I have no idea if the girl is actually alive. She walks out of the building, and then out of the movie, but that could just be in her head. The movie already established that the bed can make you hallucinate from a distance and kill you from basically anywhere, so… maybe she just was crushed by a giant foot or something.

The movie really doesn’t provide very interesting deaths, either. They’re fast and brutal, but they’re not particularly original or inventive. One girl just has her body break. Horrifying, yes. Original? No.

Then, the movie ends in another timeline, where the bed wasn’t destroyed, but is now being sold for auction, and I have to ask the question “why?” This Bed has now been the site of a minimum of 5 murders/suicides, according to authorities. This is usually the point where the state would lock it up just so crazy people can’t buy it. Also, how did they get the Bed to the auction site? Did it not kill at least a few of the people involved in cleaning, moving, storing, and displaying it? Because the movie establishes that you just have to touch it to die, and the end of the movie demonstrates that you don’t even have to have touched it IN THE CURRENT REALITY.

This movie was way more complicated than a movie about a killer bed should be. And, for the record, the bed never swallows anyone, which would have been way scarier. This movie was beaten, without effort, by the original Nightmare on Elm Street, decades before it even was created.

Update: I have now been informed that there is a movie called “Death Bed: The Bed that Eats,” that Patton Oswald has spoken about. I need to find this movie.

Unlike 13 Demons, which had a few good scenes, Birdemic and Iconoclast, which could at least say they were made by people who don’t make movies, or Reefer Madness, which at least was supposed to be an educational cautionary tale, this movie just wallows in being forgettable. I said in another review that part of the key to a “So Bad It’s Good” movie is that everyone on the film seemed to believe they were making a better movie than they did, but that really doesn’t apply here. I don’t ever feel like the cast was enjoying it, and they all clearly have at least some knowledge of acting. The basic movie is too well-shot for the lack of expertise to be laughable. The script is simultaneously too thin and too complicated, and the effects aren’t good enough to be entertaining, nor bad enough to be laughable.

This movie exists, and that’s about it. Don’t waste your time like I did.

If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.

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NOTES

Preliminary notes: Why am I sober? Why? Why would I ever be sober for this?

0:01 – A guy’s being hanged from a tree in olden times. Good start.

0:03 – Ah, the tree has been made into the bed of the dead. Well played, film.

0:04 – The scene shifts to the present, at the “Anarchist’s Sex Club.” While that’s not the worst name ever, I have decided I need alcohol. I have paused the film for the purpose of rum.

0:06 – Oh, a horror movie that involves a police investigation? I haven’t seen one of these since… actually last week with Hellraiser X.

0:08 – “That room can’t be used,” “but I’m saying things convincingly,” “Oh, then it can.” Like, I think they just directly stated it was the site of a PREVIOUS SUSPECTED MURDER.

0:10 – I cannot tell what these people are supposed to be doing here, and this is explicitly called a sex club. I haven’t seen such lack of enthusiasm for erotic adventure since… Never mind.

0:13 – Random semi-nude music video for… no reason, I think. Alcohol has been upgraded to Captain Morgan 100.

0:14 – I have never seen an orgy of people this hesitant to do anything sexual. Granted, I’ve also never seen an orgy (I have now recalled a conversation in which I was told an orgy requires a minimum of 5 people, so I guess this is just a foursome).

0:14 – Oh, hey, a terrible jump scare and the foursome is called off. Clearly the Bed of the Dead doesn’t really want them to stay.

0:15 – And they’re staying anyway. Cut to the next day and, apparently, they died by fire, and the bed is also destroyed. This movie already seems terrible.

0:16 – A wolf? No, it’s apparently one of the guy’s dog

0:20 – Invisible dog just pulled a guy under the bed and ate him.

0:22 – And the owner appears to have known about the bed. Interesting.

0:26 – Like 5 minutes of them just sitting on the bed. Dui guy is now off the bed and going to die by… weird spider cloth thing. Which apparently entered him and popped out.

0:28 – Vaping must be the new “Let me show you I’m an asshole” thing in movies.

0:32 – So the bed can show you anything even if you’re not on it. Okay…

0:33 – Guy didn’t even get on the bed and he’s being killed. Apparently, there are no rules.

0:38 – She just texted the policeman in the future. The bed can warp time, apparently.

0:40 – This movie has just gotten way more complicated than a movie about a killer bed needs to be. Actually, any movie about a killer bed is more complicated than a movie about a killer bed needs to be.

0:43 – Okay, well, the cop’s daughter is dead, I guess. Or something. Was she killed by the bed? Does any of this matter? Oh, so he has a drug problem now. And a drinking problem. Guess he picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

0:44 – Sandy actually appears to be falling asleep on the Bed of the Dead. Which is what I’m doing watching it.

0:47 – Okay, so, he’s now telling them how they died in the past from the future. And despite being mostly burned away, the bed appears to still have some power. Maybe it regenerates.

0:50 – So, they’re trying to imply that each of these people has “killed” someone, but one of the guys apparently just had a dead dog, one guy ran over a 5 year old in a DUI, one had someone take a bullet protecting her from a school shooter, and the other… unknown so far.

0:51 – Nancy has apparently decided that all of this is a hallucination… despite knowing the bed causes hallucinations.

0:56 – Officer guy knows that some supernatural stuff is going on, and that the bed’s owner knows about it, but doesn’t appear to actually want to do anything.

1:01 – Okay, and last girl was forced to have an abortion. Wait, no, maybe she killed her mother. Oh, I guess it was both.

1:02 – You need to knock her out, Sandy or Candy, whatever your name is.

1:05 – Okay, so… now he’s meeting with the last girl to survive the bed who apparently was convicted of murder.

1:08 – Flashback to last guy who got killed for leaving the bed. Husband of current woman, apparently. And he pulled his own eyes out. Something that should have been obvious to forensics.

1:09 – Okay, so, now they’re saying that the bed punishes people.

1:12 – Sandy is now being told in the past that she doesn’t have to die… but he’s standing next to her corpse.

1:13 – “It’ll have the blood it needs to take your soul. That’s how it works.” NOTHING WORKS IN ANY FORM OF LOGIC IN THIS MOVIE, SHUT THE F*CK UP.

1:16 – Okay, so… is she out? The bed just re-made itself, but the image indicates that’s because it wasn’t burned up in this timeline.

1:18 – Okay, so now he’s dead in the future, and calling the cop investigating it from the past.

1:19 – But you just said that the only reason why he could talk to her was so that she could avoid being punished. So…

1:20 – And the bed is now re-sold at auction. Despite being the location of a TON of murders. And no idea what happened to Candy. And now they’re having creepy children sing lullaby. Too late to try to scare me movie.

1:21 – They spelled Virgil’s name wrong in the credits. That tells you everything.