Shocktober: Day 13

Death Bed The Bed That Eats (1977)

Thirty-four years ago there was a man with a dream. A man who just wanted to tell a story about a bed, a bed that eats people. Tragically director George Barry simply flew too close to the sun for the film Death Bed the Bed That Eats was lost for many years. Eventually the film was rediscovered in the early 2000s and released on dvd in 2003. Since then it has achieved cult status thanks to word of mouth from fans and from a classic bit by comedian Patton Oswalt, this is some serious shit.

What can one really imagine after hearing a title like “Death Bed”? First of all you’ll probably think, “There’s no way in hell that’s actually a movie.” Once this barrier has been broken down you’d probably assume it’s just a really bad monster/slasher kind of movie, but then you’d only be half right. Death Bed is no more a movie than an avant garde experiment. It’s kind of like the ultimate bad student art film in that it tries to be deep with perhaps the worst premise ever conceived by man. Death Bed is closer to being a documentary than your typical b-horror movie which lets it inhabit this bizarre mid-ground between two genres.

The film details the narrated history of the death bed through the use of out of sequence events from different points in time. We see it kill people in the past and present while learning of it’s unspeakable evil from a man trapped behind a painting in the same room as the bed? Yes this man or ghost or whatever tells the story of the death bed and all it’s victims (including himself) in some sort of extra dimensional limbo but can also communicate to individuals when the bed sleeps… Yeah that’s right when the bed sleeps. What we learn from this man is that the death bed was once a demon, but wait the demon was also once a tree. So the tree demon became a wind demon and then fell in love with a woman he blew past. The demon then became a human demon and made a bed. The demon-man made love to the woman on the bed but she died which then made the demon-man’s eyes bleed onto the bed and it became possessed, did you get all that?

So being that a bed is an immobile antagonist all the scenes must depict events that have taken place near, around, or in the bed. I assume the heavy narration is due to the low budget as most of the actual dialogue is clearly dubbed but they needed something to make the film at least semi-comprehensible. So the only entertainment value in this film comes from the death bed’s kills. How does one get killed by a death bed? Well you see the death bed secretes a kind of stomach acid that sucks people down inside and then digests them. This has some great comic value as various people die and are injured in an overly comedic fashion, including a man who has his hand’s turned into skeleton hands.

This is another film that could of been a great comedy but instead took itself far too serious. If you want to see a good “bed death”, you should probably check out Nightmare on Elm Street because this one will really put you to sleep.

Skip ahead to about the 3:50 mark to see one of the death bed’s finest moments.

Shocktober: Day 12

Night of the Lepus (1972)

Ever since Hitchcock’s The Birds there’s been no shortage of killer animal movies just about every year. This fascination with creepy critters seemed to culminate in the 70s when these films were a dime a dozen. You had films like; Frogs, Kingdom of the Spiders, Grizzly, Squirm, Day of the Animals, Empire of the Ants, Dracula’s Dog that came out like clockwork, but Night of the Lepus, there was something special about that one. Sure most of these films were stupid, but at least the animals featured in most of them had some potential to be deadly. Ants, spiders, bears, hell even some frogs can secrete toxins, but rabbits? Cute, cuddly, innocent, little rabbits? The fact that anyone thought an audience would be afraid of rabbits boggles the mind but really you can’t believe it till you see it.

So the setup is that thousands of rabbits have invaded a southwestern town after all their natural predators (coyotes) were somehow eliminated. So this rancher (Rory Calhoun) wants a very seventies looking Deforest “Bones” Kelley playing a college president to find a way to thin the rabbit population along with two other researchers (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh.) So they experiment with a test rabbit, a little girl falls in love with it, the rabbit escapes and the next thing you know there’s giant killer rabbits I guess. What’s a surprise about all this is the first half of the film actually seems pretty competent. This film follows a ridiculous premise yes, but the acting is good and the campiness is kept to a minimum. Then you have the reveal of the giant rabbits and all hope is lost.

It’s the fact that this film takes itself so seriously that hampers it the most. This solemn tone works okay in the first half but by the time the giant rabbits show up it’s embarrassing. Maybe it could have passed it the rabbits were even remotely scary but they’re just regular rabbits that only look big due to some not so impressive camera techniques. The rabbits rarely seem to interact with the other actors on screen, rather we only see them constantly running towards the camera in slow motion. So from their reveal to their fateful demise (they eventually get electrocuted on some train tracks) this is a total suck fest, oh yes and of course it ends on an ambiguous note. “Some of them survived?” ugh, that’s all folks.

Here’s a rabbit attack clip, it’s a little fuzzy but it’s there in all it’s glory.

Shocktober: Day 11

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

The story behind this horrendous horror flick starts in 1966 when theater actor/fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren made a bet with future oscar winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a successful independent horror movie. So he assembled a crew and cast of people and with little to no film experience made what’s probably one of the worst films ever to be seen by man. I’ll admit that the first twenty minutes are pretty funny but after awhile I found myself slowly slipping into a state of severe depression as the film got more and more out of hand.

Two years ago on this blog I picked this film as my number one least favorite horror film of all time. Since then I’ve probably seen a few films worse but this is still one helluva suckfest. Out of all the film’s I watched for this series this is maybe the worse in regards to the film’s technical aspects. The image quality is scratchy at best and the additional audio recording all seems to be a beat off. Its just hilarious how the score seems to hit all the wrong cues, they couldn’t of messed up any harder if they tried.

Briefly recapping the plot Manos: The Hands of Fate is about a a family of three (Harold P. Warren is the father) that take a road trip through Texas but end up becoming the victims of a Polygamous Pagan cult. The first cult member we are introduced to is Torgo (John Reynolds) a satyr-like servant of “The Master” who takes care of a house in the middle of nowhere. Torgo is easily my favorite character as he gets the most laughs for his many moments of creepy awkwardness while around the family. To play Torgo actor John Reynolds wore prosthetics to create the illusion of satyr legs. Unfortunately he wore them backwards while filming and caused permanent damage to his knees which led to an addiction to painkillers until his tragic suicide a month before the film’s premiere, damn that’s sad. Back to the movie it more or less descends into nonsense once we are introduced to the “Master” and his crazy cult and the family “Spolier Alert” eventually joins the cult as we are eventually left with the words “The End?” Yeah I’m serious, they just made all the right moves didn’t they? If you’re gonna check this one just check out the first 15 minutes, the rest is more or less the equivalent of going to hell.

Shocktober: Day 10

Monster a-Go Go (1965)

Monster a-Go Go seems like one of those films where someone really wanted to make a quick buck by using the least amount of effort imaginable, including the overall lack of an idea. I’d imagine it was the monster craze of the 1960s that was responsible for even giving movies like this a chance. If you don’t know what I’m referring to I mean when things like Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine and Aurora Models helped reignite interest in the monsters of the 1930s with the young baby boomer crowd. This resulted in monsters, monsters, everywhere! But with the strange exception that no one was making any GOOD monsters movies to capitalize on this renewed interest. Instead you had all these cheap ass, double feature drive-in disasters and this is one of them.

According to IMDb this movie is about “A space capsule crash-lands, and the astronaut aboard disappears. Is there a connection between the missing man and the monster roaming the area?” Hey, I’m still not sure. So the astronaut, Frank I believe his name was apparently transforms or is um, somehow replaced by an ugly thing that looks like Gene Siskel with a cup of acid thrown in his face. So the military tries to capture him, they eventually do capture him and then he escapes again. Oh yeah and were not shown any of this military involvement the narrator just tells us that’s what happened. Later we learn that the monster was just immitating Frank, but then were told it never even existed? What the hell is going on here!

Doing a little research (Wikipedia) I learned that the original filmmaker Bill Rebane ran out of money while making this film. So strangely enough Herschell Gordon Lewis (that gory horror director that Jason Bateman likes in Juno) finished the film so that he could have a second film to show with his own feature Moonshine Mountain in a double bill. To do this Lewis added extra scenes and some more dialogue that somehow only made the film worse and even more convoluted. This whole process took several years which is probably why half of the film’s cast disappears midway into the film.

In addition to a messy production, Monster A Go-Go has all the essential makings of a bad 60s horror movie; copious amounts of unnecessary narration, a terrible looking monster, and lots of pointless filler. How hard can it be to just make a good monster movie? Very hard in this case. I mean even in the worst monster movies there should be some camp value in looking at the goofy monster but you don’t even get that satisfaction. I can barely even remember seeing the monster more than once, the rest of the time you just hear the narrator describing what happened in a scene we never saw, I didn’t know you could make movies that way! His screen time is so ridiculously minimal it’s like they sat down and said, “Hey let’s make a monster movie without a monster.”But perhaps the greatest question of all… What the hell is a “Monster a Go-Go?”

Shocktober: Day 9

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964)

Some movies are good, some are bad, and some are Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, if you can even consider that a movie. I mean the title sums it up just perfectly, this is a film where no one had any idea what they were doing. I.S.C.W.S.L.B.M.U.Z is a film that’s one part monster movie, one part musical, and all parts incredibly discomforting acid trip. This is a film where I imagine they took a few different “ideas” put them in a blender, drank them, vomited them up and then put them back in the blender. The confines of logic do not exist in this nightmarish experience and one can only be left with regret after seeing an abomination like this.

The premise is that of an evil gypsy that hypnotizes and turns people into zombies at some kind of carnival… I think. Interspersed with all of this are long sequences of painfully boring song-and-dance numbers that probably dominate more of the film’s running time then anything else. If the makers of this film set out to disturb and confuse moviegoers than they most definitely succeeded. Hmm, now I’m drawing a blank, suppose I did a good job of erasing this from mind already.

If you must witness this diarrhea nightmare I highly recommend you take the Mystery Science Theater 3000 route it will make it at least mildly tolerable, but whether the running time of this film was 82 minutes or 10 minutes, it would still feel like an eternity.

I’d post a picture or video but they’re all of such poor quality, so why even bother?

Shocktober: Day 8

The Creeping Terror (1964)

I’ve seen a lot of monsters but nothing quite matches the crappiness of this blob-like mess. Supposedly the makers of The Creeping Terror originally made a much better monster suit but it got stolen. So with little money to spend they assembled a creature so ridiculous that it’s now infamously known as the “Pile of Carpets” because that’s basically what it is. So what do you do when you have a monster movie with a terrible looking monster? Show it? How about non-stop? Hell yeah!

The premise is simple, a newlywed couple encounters a spaceship, a monster emerges, and therefore they must stop it! Though what’s really strange about all of this is that watching this movie is like watching some kind of educational instructional video. This is because it was a lot cheaper back in the day to film without sound so to make up for it the makers recorded a shitload of narration in post production. Now you’ve probably heard me complain about too much narration in past posts but this one takes the cake. Here we have scenes where characters are clearly talking but instead of being dubbed in, a narrator just takes care of all their dialogue. “Martin said to James blah blah, James thought it about for a minute.” it’s very unusual, almost like your listening to a book on tape but with images, and this is not a good read.

The narrator’s dialogue is so tiresome that I was almost ready to give up on this movie after a few minutes, but then the monster showed up, and man when he shows up does he show up. I can’t believe how bad this monster looks and that it actually manages to catch anyone is a miracle. They weren’t lying when they called this terror “Creeping” it’s so slow that the only way it can kill people is basically whenever someone is stupid enough to fall into it.

You can basically split this movie up into two parts; 1. Explaining why there’s a monster and what everyone thinks about it and 2. The never-ending monster attack. And the sounds this thing makes! “Urgh, bleh, Uhh!” it sounds like a guy throwing up and that’s just what this film is, a big ol’ pile of puke.

The Creeping Terror in action! Can you tell what’s going on here?

Shocktober: Day 7

Eegah (1962)

Best known as the iconic steel-toothed “Jaws” from the Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker Richard Kiel may be the most famous 7’2″ actor to ever grace the screen. An advantage that gave him countless roles as various thugs and monsters it will always be this particular film that will stand as his most infamous. The film is Eegah and it’s the harrowing tale of an eon old caveman that terrorizes teens in the California desert. It’s got a heartbreaking love story, suspense, action, even a little crooning, so it has something for everyone!

Our film begins when hip teen Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning) is driving to a party through the California desert. Roxy stops by a gas station where were introduced to her fugly, geetar strummin’, sweetheart Tom (Arch Hall Jr. the director’s son.) Sadly Tom has to wait until his shift is over to go the party but he fondly passes the time by telling gas station customers about his swell girl Roxy “That’s my girl, her father is Robert I. Miller. You should see her swim, she lives up at the club!” I’m sure that customer was really impressed.

But we all know you shouldn’t drive through the desert at night because wuh oh! There’s giant cavemen living out there! Luckily or unluckily Roxy escapes from a caveman attack and hurries back to her sweetheart and father Robert I. Miller (Arch Hall Sr.) who writes “Adventure Books” whatever those are. So instead of reporting it to the police Richard I. Miller decides to head out the next day and look for the caveman because he writes adventure books. Heading out in his explorer gear (pith helmet included) Richard somehow stumbles upon the caveman and is knocked unconscious by being lightly pushed over into sand.

Meanwhile Tom serenades Roxy by a pool in a musical segment that would make the Everly Brothers vomit with rage. The song is called “Vicki” but I guess his girlfriend “ROXY” likes it anyway. After this painfully ear shattering ordeal Tom and Roxy go to find their father in the desert in Tom’s dune buggy. Though Tom is apparently “all about” this dune buggy as they spend about two to three minutes joyriding to 60s guitar music. This is where I first notice how much dialogue and sound in general must of been recorded much later because the additional sound rarely synchs up well and never matches the same room tone.

So time flies, they worry about the whereabouts of Richard, Tom sings another song about “Vitamins” and “Galleries” or something and then boom! Roxy is attacked by the caveman and taken back to his cave. This is where we really get to know Eegah the forever grumbling and bumbling giant who actually has a heart. Here we are as well reunited with a Richard. Dead bodies surround the walls of the cave which Richard has learned are Eegah’s relatives. How he knows this I have no idea as Eegah really can’t say anything but “Eegah!” Richard also says “Eegah” is his name cause that’s all he can say, kind of like a Pokemon. Oh yeah and Eegah has survived for centuries by drinking sulfur water. Wow, Richard sure learned a lot while being held captive by a caveman who doesn’t speak english.

Seeing how much time I’ve spent on the plot let me try and wrap this up. Basically it’s your typical “Teens terrorized by a monster” movie with lots of running, yelling, and pointless filler. Characters are incredibly stupid, they faint constantly, and never seem to have anything important or interesting to say. Eegah has it’s funny moments but the filler scenes just make me cringe. Fortunately there’s a very funny Mystery Science Theater 3000 that makes this film remotely watchable, check it and you’ll have a gay old time.