Review – Death Bed

For years I’ve been slamming Full Moon in general and Stuart Gordon in particular for producing movies that are little more than flimsy excuses for tons of tit shots and cheap gore. So I expect I’ll sound like a complete hypocrite for griping that this movie didn’t have anywhere near enough stage guts or exploitative sex. But when the premise is that an old bed in a couple’s new loft is haunted by kinky bondage ghosts, one expects the producers’ usual bag of tricks. I concede the possibility that I somehow ended up with an edited-for-squeamish-video-stores version, and there were some oddly-cut sequences that supported that theory. But sex and sexism aside, this would have been a stinker no matter what elements were included or left out. The acting was bad as usual (including a supporting role by Joe Estevez, whom I assume is related somehow to Martin Sheen), the script was bad as usual, but the real killer was the pacing. The production had an almost soap-opera-esque ability to structure drama so that the plot advances as little as possible. That might work for shows that have to eke out five hours a week, but for a simple 80-minute movie it alternated between just plain annoying and so annoying that it actually became sort of funny. Wish I’d skipped it