By Simon Thompson
Dakota Thomas’s Bedridden is a cliché-ridden mess, filled with acting so atrocious it wouldn’t be out of place in a Lifetime movie. Bedridden tells the story of Teri, a grieving widow (whose husband Ray was murdered right in front of her), trying to rebuild her life with her two daughters. This sounds like a relatively simple premise until you get further into the narrative of the movie, and you come to discover that Dakota Thomas and Christian Valencia’s script accumulates various other plotlines which could be three-act structures of their own.
There is a sub-plot about Teri’s eldest daughter being pregnant which drags the narrative focus almost below sea level, only for it to be hastily tacked onto Teri’s arc at the end. The other b-plot involving the police investigation of Ray’s death goes absolutely nowhere, with the character of Detective Calderon being introduced as a seemingly pivotal player in the narrative, only for him to be given next to nothing to by Thomas and Valencia before he turns up again at the film’s end.
I won’t go into the full details of the plot for the sake of brevity but the best way I could summarise it is that Bedridden would be the end result if you asked Tommy Wiseau to direct a movie which combined The Exorcist and The Crow with an episode of CSI Miami.
Martina Ramirez and Selena Tinajero’s cinematography is the only thing that Bedridden really has going for it. Ramirez and Tinajero pull off a tricky combo of combining the visual styles of 70s horror with modern-day cinematography with considerable flair and skill- it’s just a shame it was for Bedridden. To conclude, Bedridden is a forgettable, derivative, and frustrating tyre fire with a clumsily executed story that doesn’t go anywhere.
Bloody Flicks 