Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977) **

Picture Herschell Gordon Lewis making a Jean Rollin film and you have Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977). Despite the great title, the film is...something. Attempting to be arty and surreal and accomplishing it on some level but spectacularly failing on most. This bizarre curio, in the vein of George A. Romero’s ‘70s output, plays like a precursor to The Evil Dead (1981) (review) with half the visual flair. 

Death Bed is incredibly repetitive, features a pulsing, abrasive score, and really pads out its running time (a whopping 1h 17m that feels like 2 hours). The director, George Barry, appears to have a major foot fetish because there is some serious pes worship going on in this picture (and it is disturbing how many people put their feet on the titular bed without taking their shoes off, so I could see why DB would want to eat them). 

All that said, there are some incredibly funny moments and gore gags in this movie—it's like a car wreck you can’t look away from; enticing even when it’s boring, though an experience I don’t think I could ever put myself through again.