text: Watching "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats" is like waking up in the hospital, two days into a suicide<br /><br />watch, disorienting but oddly stimulating. There are few cinematic equivalents to this disturbing yet often humorous lesson in mythology, morality and surrealist ideology.<br /><br />Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" and Maya Deren's<br /><br />experimental works evoke a taste of the strange atmosphere found in DEATH BED. A close comparison are the dark adult fairy-tales by literary genius- author Angela Carter, the short disturbing stories of Unica<br /><br />Zurn or E.T.A. Hoffman. <br /><br />DEATH BED has many recognizable elements of the<br /><br />past, but displays a wholly unique and original storyline.<br /><br />As a story, DEATH BED is an amazingly simple yet original<br /><br />vision, something which only one-in-a-thousand independent releases will manage to accomplish. This unassuming film has its technical flaws but overcomes them all with a cast of beautiful non-actors<br /><br />and lost creepy locations- a true 1970s independent classic. <br /><br />DEATH BED also displays a unique, subversive, 3-dimensional personality-- a deep and continuous layering of dream images and ideas that lend it a "fun-house" type of construct. The passage of time told in flashbacks and historic time travelogues, the bed with its sinister black humor, the rich yet understated symbolism used within its imagery. Most pleasing is the image of Aubrey Beardsly, the suffering artist, forever trapped inside the frame of his own painting as he comments on and fondles with the murdered victim "offerings" gifted to him as love offerings by the demented bed's spirit. -- A sick refrain and wonderful element /metaphor for the "trapped artist" -- Nothing but the weirdest in POE or MALLARME can equal that. <br /><br />Anyone who values the spirit of independent cinema and craves the multi-layered symbolist experience, or craves the Surrealist concept of "convulsive<br /><br />beauty" and the Gothic-horror leanings of low budget exploitation film-making will dig this totally unique vision. A simple and fun film with deliciously deep psychic undercurrents. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. *****