Bed Rest

I will be honest, this movie looked mediocre to me and my thoughts were confirmed after watching the first few minutes. It looked to be an average haunted house movie where a happy family is torn down towards the end. The only thing slightly different was that the wife is pregnant. I stuck with it to see if there was any uniqueness due to that and I'm actually glad I did. Despite the run of the mill introduction, there was actually some intelligence here and there was a lot of substance towards the end. The main actress was very good and she sort of carried this movie on her back. If this movie had the pacing it did towards the last half hour, a lot of people would stick around and enjoy it. The scare factor could have been upped for sure and should have been executed better to be really effective but overall, I would recommend it for a simple horror movie night.

Honestly, my expectations with these low budget, straight-to-streaming horror films is so low, that I genuinely thought a movie where a woman is bed ridden for most of the runtime (at least supposedly) would be a bad imitation of Gerald's Game. (To be fair, that was also straight-to-streaming).

Instead, Bed Rest is a mishmash of a bunch of different horror films: a ghost story, a person-going-crazy story, a conspiracy, a malignant demon story; it's a lot. Being so much actually kind helped the film, to be honest, as I can't say I was ever bored watching it.

Melissa Barrera gives a better performance than I'd expect for a film that looks this cheap and lit this badly. She's really trying despite the material. The rest of the small cast...not so much. There's something about the line delivery by most of these people that felt off.

As I mentioned before, this movie looks, sounds, and is edited pretty terribly. It overuses the grating jump score note every bad, straight-to-streaming horror film uses (you know the one), even when what we're seeing wouldn't be scary within any definition of the word. The effects are bad, there's no atmosphere...it's just not very good.

And yet, for a random watch on a Wednesday, I didn't truly hate it. 2024 has been so bad for horror, I'll take what I can get.

Bed Rest" is a horror movie that had its moments of suspense and thrills, but it also had its fair share of slow and uneventful parts. The acting of Melissa Barrera was a standout for me, and her performance helped to keep me engaged in the story. The themes explored in the movie, such as pregnancy, lost pregnancy and lost children trauma, trust issues and mental health issues, made it more adult oriented and added depth to the story. However, the movie's reliance on cheap jump scares and strange whispering voices and sounds felt overused and detracted from the overall experience. The ending was not as satisfying as I hoped it would be, leaving me feeling a bit underwhelmed. Overall, while "Bed Rest" has its merits, it is not a movie that I would highly recommend.

Tldr; don't waste your time with this submid movie.

I cannot understand why anyone was raving about this lukewarm mess or why it garnered any high reviews here, unless someone paid for them. A grotesque lack of explanation for a series of illogical setup decisions, coupled with a last-minute plot twist that felt like it wasn't even in the script until halfway through filming because it had zero foreshadowing whatsoever, all amount to an uninteresting slog of a film that's barely worth the talent of the main cast. The jump scares are few, unimpactful and badly timed, there's barely any suspense and what little drama there is comes strictly from a cliché stereotype of a strained marriage. Trying to shoehorn some kind of "letting go" moral into the narrative just made it even clumsier and obnoxious, especially since said moral barely gets referenced again when the supernatural elements actually start playing out. One could easily cut off the first two thirds of the movie and make a much better short film out of just the last twenty minutes or so, since everything relevant to the climax of the plot only comes out at that point. Worse still, it's not bad -enough- to be entertainingly bad, no horrifically bad acting or overly ridiculous practical effects to laugh at, no scenery-chewing or overacting to give it any charm. Overall, the movie just feels like it was thrown together as they were filming by someone too convinced of their own brilliance to accept that they had no clue what they were doing and released with an unironic "nailed it" afterward like a cinematic cake wreck. It's not awful but it's simply not good at all.

Just another horror movie with a most basic horror plot known to humanity. Two more millions of these on the way...

The overall scene was okay, although the house didn't seem creepy, I feel like they failed to maintain any horror atmosphere to it.

It's hard to sympathize the main character, as she is basically constantly punishing people around her and herself for something that cannot be undone or fixed. Creating trouble from nothing. Classic silly behavior, inability to just talk stuff out and reason leads to conflict growing unreasonably and alogically. On the other hand, some might say that is probably realistic with her being pregnant and all... still this excuse doesn't make it any better, as the twist is just shallow and weak, and seems forced.

It's not terrible, if you just have nothing to watch at night and you randomly see this coming up on a TV, you might as well see it through, but overall, it's passable and forgettable. Holds no artistic value I dare to say.