by MATTHEW HAYS

What's a nice, unassuming Detroit bookseller like George Barry doing behind a movie like this?

That question keeps running through my mind as I chat up Barry from his Detroit home. For years, Barry, now 54, ran a popular used bookstore in his home town, until he shut it down and shifted his sales gig to the Internet. In the '80s, he had a couple of kids. It all sounds pretty normal so far.

But two years ago, while searching the Internet, Barry would discover a piece of his past that's proven as surprising to him as it has to everyone else. Barry found himself on a horror movie specialty site, where someone asked him about the movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. He responded that he certainly had an opinion about the movie - hell, he made it, in fact.

Sleeping in the enemy

The fact that his film has a devoted cult following throughout the U.S .and Europe is as surreal as the movie is itself. Death Bed is the alternately horrifying and hilarious tale about a centuries-old bed that eats humans. Throughout the film, unsuspecting people cuddle in between the sheets, only to find themselves getting gobbled up by the evil bed. Barry, who also wrote the film, then cuts to shots of the bed's intestines, as a yellow fluid soaks everything the bed consumes (a bit like the wash cycle in your local laundromat).

It's weird all right. And it's often very, very funny. But weirder still is the fact that Barry's film managed to find distribution and a cult audience without ever having been released - at least not with his knowledge. It is one of the strangest no-budget wonder movie stories, ever.

In the early '70s, Barry says he was struggling through what was a "pretty unsuccessful academic career," working on a degree at Monteith College. He says there was no film program per se, but he decided he wanted to step out with about $10,000 of his own money and shoot a feature film on colour 16mm. He can't recall the precise point of inspiration for Death Bed ("I get that question a lot," he concedes), but vaguely remembers it emanating from a dream he had. "I dreamt of a bed that wasn't necessarily carnivorous, but was consuming things," he says. "If you think about it, people do that every night: you give yourself over to the bed and when you sleep, you're not in control."

Thus Death Bed has some eerie dream sequences interspersed with the piece of furniture's gory gobbling scenes. But surprisingly, Barry says he's "not big into Freud or Jung, though Jung can be lots of fun. I didn't write the film for psychological reasons."

Greed and pirates

Barry says his cinematic influences are fairly "pedestrian," including basics like Greed, Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz, though he also admits to having a penchant for the B-grade versions of tales involving Dracula, Frankenstein and the Werewolf.

Death Bed was a labour of love; Barry and his cast and crew began shooting in '72, only to languish in a process Barry calls "highly inefficient," one that meant the answer print wasn't done until '77. Death Bed never got a release. It was screened only a couple of times for industry types.

Barry suspects that at one of the labs that developed his print, a copy was made and that was then pirated in Europe. That English-language print, he's since found out, was itself pirated and a Spanish-language version was released. Barry has no bitterness about money that may have been made from his work - in fact, he says that in a sense he's thankful: "Now I know the film reached an audience."

A few interviews on the Internet later, and Barry is now overseeing a DVD release of Death Bed, all these years later. "People have said, ‘What a strange movie.' I never set out to make a strange movie, so I don't see it that way. But I do find it strange that so many are liking this film. I thought its time would have passed, that tastes would have changed. I was wrong."

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats screens this weekend at the Cinéma du Parc

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