Four young adults, visiting a sex club, find themselves trapped on a bed…while a Detective arrives at the club to investigate a fire in that room, along with several bodies…
The Dwelling, also known as Bed Of The Dead was made in 2016. It is written by Cody Calahan and Jeff Maher, with Maher directing. It’s set over one night in two different time frames, following the four on the bed and the detective who investigates the aftermath.
It sounds like a potentially interesting set-up, doesn’t it? Well, it might…had it known what to do with it. The plot has so many gaping holes and unanswered questions, it’s hard to know where to begin.
During the opening credits, we see a man being dragged to a tree, being hung from it then killed, by figures in robes. It gives the impression we’re going to get some kind of cult or sacrifice type of film. BUT NO! As the credits continue a woodsman comes along and cuts the tree down and the makes a bed out of it.
And from there, the film goes downhill fast.
The four people, two couples are there for a night of sex together to celebrate the birthday of one of them, which ends pretty fast with nothing happening. They fall asleep, only to wake up after one of them sees something and leaves the bed…
After this, we are left to wonder why everything is happening, what is causing it.
At the same time, there is a detective, the cliched cop-on-the-edge with a tragic past, drinking and taking drugs while on the job, investigating the fire in the club that took place in the same room.
Somehow, one of the girls in the group, Sandy is able to contact the Detective in the future. We never really get an answer as to why this happens, but then there’s a lot in this film that doesn’t get answered. If you can’t leave the bed as something bad will happens, what will happen to you if you touch it?
The suggestion is that if you are guilty of something, you are being punished for it. Okay, with it likely the bed has been handled many, many times over the years, did those who had touched it over the years suffer for it? A bed with some kind of cursed history, you would think someone, somewhere would have noticed a bed where mysterious deaths are connected to it in some way?
In some ways, this film recalls the film, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and suffers from similar issues (though which film is better is debatable), the main one being not making any sense at all.
The performances from the cast, including Colin Price, Alysa King, Gwenlyn Cumyn, Dennis Andres and George Krissa aren’t that good, which doesn’t help. You simply do not care about any of them.
It’s never scary, often infuriating and for a film that is set in a sex club, very prudish indeed. It makes you wonder why it was set there in the first place. As a title, The Dwelling doesn’t work. The original title Bed Of The Dead isn’t really that much better.
But under whichever title you watch it, this is a film that will put you to sleep.
Rating: * out of 5
