Possibly the worst movie on the planet is released to the public for your Halloween pleasure. Enjoy “Deathbed.”

“Deathbed: The Bed that Eats”

Running time: 88 Minutes

Rating: Unrated

Imaging going to a quaint summerhouse, surrounded by nature for a brief vacation. The house is flanked by grassy fields, flowers, and a scant amount of woods.

During the hot afternoon, you retire to the bedroom where you decide a mid-afternoon nap is in order. After turning back the covers and snuggling into the overfilled comforter, you realize that you are beginning to sink into the bed.

Sinking, down, down, down, until you are completely enveloped by the bed. You soon find yourself in a mysterious yellow substance with nowhere to go. Lungs starving for air, you open you mouth to take a breath.

The yellow liquid floods your lungs, feeling like a million knives destroying your insides. However you ignore this feeling because you realize that you are being digested; the bed has just eaten you.

Twenty-six years after filming, “Deathbed: The Bed that Eats” directed by George Barry was released for the first time in 2003 in a limited run of DVDs.

The movie has an interesting story to go along with the creative part.

Filmed in two parts, the first part was filmed in 1972 and the rest of the film was recorded in 1977. To start, the entire budget of “Deathbed” was $30,000 (about $147,000 in today’s money) compared to “Ironman’s” 2008 budget of $180 million.

The first part of the movie, filmed in 1972, was filmed with no sound because it was too expensive and the budget did not cover it at the time. In 1977 when the rest of the movie was filmed, the producers deemed it too expensive to reshoot the scenes, and just cut the sound over the film in the studio.

Also, the film was shot in two different film formats. The first part of the movie was shot in 8mm format, and the second was shot in 16mm, causing more problems during productions, and lower quality for the end viewer.

George Barry couldn’t sell the film to any studios after the production was complete. He offered it to numerous studios in the late 1970s and early 1980s but Barry never succeeded and eventually forgot about the movie. Barry never directed again.

The movie is so horrifically bad, that only one actor ever went on to do anything else.

William Russ, the sole actor who succeeded after this tragedy of a film, played “Alan Mathews” on the Disney show “Boy Meets World” among other things.

In 2002 Barry was surfing Internet movie forums. Clicking through some obscure forums, he eventually came upon a post titled “have you seen this film?” The poster, a man from France, has seen “Deathbed,” and was trying to find out some more info about it.

Unbeknownst to Barry, a “Deathbed” reel had been pirated. The pirated copy had been circulated and dubbed into other languages.

After posting on the forums that he directed “Deathbed,” he learned that his movie had a small cult following and was being widely circulated around the independent movie circuit.

THE MOVIE

“Deathbed: The Bed that Eats,” which has not been rated by the Motion Picture Association of America, runs 88 minutes and is a classic in the sense that it was filmed 31 years ago. In the words of the late Will McDonald, “Deathbed” “Sucks Major.”

“Deathbed” is so epically bad you would not think that the $30,000 budget was too high to produce this low quality one-off horror-ish film.

The grand, four-poster bed, which lures unsuspecting people into the warm down covers captured the ghost of an artist and imprisoned him in a painting to act as a narrator of the movie. In return, the artist gets all of the material possessions that the bed eats off of the victims, namely jewelry, cigarettes, and books.

The bed meets its demise when three female friends obtain use of the estate that the bed is on for the weekend. “Deathbed” successfully eats two of the girls, but when the brother of the last remaining girl comes to the house to find her, he realizes what is going on without seeing anything, or even talking to his sister.

Somehow the two perform a complex satanic ritual around the bed, drag it outside (they don’t show this of course) and burn it, successfully ending the movie and cutting to the brief credits.

“Deathbed: The Bed that Eats” is so terrible, so bloody awful, that in-fact those same reasons make it memorable and absolutely wonderful.

The cheesy plot, the lack of dialogue, the “special effects” (HA!) and the acting are all reasons not to watch this movie. Watch it for the novelty, watch it just to say “I have seen the worst movie ever, prove me wrong.”

Although I am glad I saw this movie, I would not want to willingly watch it again.

My roommate called this a “legit” movie when he told me about it. He said that Patton Oswalt, an American stand-up comedian, did a bit about it in 2007 and told people to look it up on IMDB.com if they didn’t believe him.

This movie currently resides dead last on my mental “worst movies ever list.” At number three, is “Gigli” the 2003 Jennifer Lopez – Ben Affleck film that cost $54 million to make and grossed only $6 million. The film was a disaster on every level and gives a new meaning to the word incoherent.

At number two is the 2007 flick “Babes in Kongland” which quite possibly could have been an attempt at a decent movie, but the plot got lost, so did the budget apparently, and it turns into a softcore porn and never really gets back to the intended plot.

God awful.

By Kyle G. Horst Entertainment Editor