Horror schlock extraordinaire

Remember when I said I was looking for October horror options outside of my standard streaming services?

Kanopy to the rescue.

Kanopy, the free streaming service some people can access through their library membership, does not have what you would call a comprehensive collection, nor I suppose would you expect it to. It's free, so any damn thing it has is a bonus, and it does have a lot of useful stuff.

And in this case it blew open the doors of the possibilities of horror for October. In fact, I'm not sure if I'm going to fit in all the ones I want to watch, especially since I'm heading to the U.S. for the last week of the month and I have a lot of viewing priorities unrelated to horror that I also need to squeeze in.

Not only is there some of the good classic horror I've been looking for, such as the 1959 Vincent Price-starring House on Haunted Hill, but they've also got an essential 1980s horror text I have yet to experience from an essential horror director, David Cronenberg's Scanners. Then you've got something that just looks like great exploitation, Abel Ferrera's The Driller Killer. They've also got a couple movies I'd love to revisit this month, including Carnival of Souls and Beyond the Black Rainbow.

And, of course, they have Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.

That one I actually watched on Friday night, and boy.

I must say I spent a lot of the time asking myself how bad this 1977 low budget horror was. There were times that I thought it was Manos: The Hands of Fate bad, then there were other times I convinced myself that it's so bizarre it might be great, and that the various visual concepts were executed to the best of the ability of this minuscule budget. I ultimately went with a 1.5 star rating on Letterboxd as a compromise that erred on the Manos side of things.

Either way, you've got to see this movie.

Essentially it's about a canopy bed in an abandoned mansion that has been possessed by a demon, and this means it can eat people. In my mind I imagined the mattress actually morphing into a kind of mouth and going chomp chomp on its victims, but that kind of thing is hard to do on a small budget without looking ridiculous -- and say what you will about George Barry's film, I don't think he wants it to be ridiculous.

Instead, the bed exudes this kind of foaming acid that causes its victims to sink down into the mattress and be dissolved by the equivalent of its stomach acid. Of course, it's not just human beings that might be eaten. The bed also eats an apple (amusingly, only down to the core), some fried chicken (amusingly, just the skin and meat) and even a full bottle of wine (the bed that drinks).

The fact that the bones are still left creates certain moments that do seem to be intentionally hilarious, and though the following picture constitutes a "spoiler," it may also entice you to see the movie:

To quote Chief Wiggum: "What're you going to use, skeleton powers?"

The acting is so incredibly bad as to defy explanation -- the woman in this picture, despite being in peril throughout, rarely sees her expression change from some small variation on the one you see here. The guy's reaction to having his hands dissolved by the bed is similarly detached.

One of the funniest things about the movie is that it is narrated by a man who has been cursed to live inside a painting on the wall of the room with the bed. We seem him from time to time, sitting in a small enclosed space that is meant to represent the inside of the painting. The funny thing is, this guy is a different actor who does not actually provide the narration himself. I suppose you need to actually see this character to understand that this is what's supposed to be going on, but it just kind of makes it all the more hilarious.

Thanks Kanopy. Now instead of despairing over the paucity of good horror streaming options, I'm licking my chops for Saturday night.