Jack Bayless’s debut feature, My Only Friend’s A Corpse, feels like a worn-out VHS tape.
That’s a compliment.
It’s 70 minutes, the right length. Also a compliment. And it’s a road trip through the supernatural underbelly of the Midwest where a nobody and his dead body best friend hit the backroads on a path to kill God.
On paper—and on screen—this shouldn’t work as smoothly as it does. Yet beneath the rotting flesh, splatter-heavy set pieces, and blasphemous premise lies a surprisingly endearing buddy movie with a huge heart, a metric ton of gooey practical effects and a resonant exploration of loyalty.
At its core, the film poses a provocative thesis: loyalty is the ultimate test of friendship. A true friend sticks by you and has your back even when you’re acting questionably, committing crimes or embarking on an iconoclastic mission that threatens to tear down the very foundations of reality. As the title implies, Danny (Sam Christensen) has no friends until he encounters the Corpse. But because the Corpse is essentially an inert body that Danny has to lug around like a ventriloquist’s dummy—and is voiced by Christensen himself—there is a psychological, almost solipsistic current running beneath the chaos. It often feels as though the lonely, long-haired lollygagger is simply talking to himself, negotiating his own place in an arbitrary, unforgiving universe.
“I need you to help me kill God,” the Corpse announces during their first encounter—strikingly brief moments after Danny sneaks away from his drunk, deadbeat dad (played by producer Key Tawn Toothman). Their union makes an odd kind of sense: both openly revolt against paternal authority. The Corpse wants revenge against the Ultimate Cause for being reduced to “a rotting skeleton next to a dumpster eating a dead dude,” while Danny is fleeing the controlling influence of his father.
This shared struggle against errant patriarchy cements their odd-couple dynamic, with Danny supplying the humanity the Corpse lacks. Even as Danny is repeatedly warned by numerous people he meets—the Fisherman (Jayce Lamb), Gaia (Auryona Webb), and an Angel (Brayden J Copp)—that his undead companion is a manipulative trickster, Danny remains faithful to the bitter end. He willingly faces tribulation, commits murder and ushers in an apocalyptic revolution—destined, like a tragic Jesus with a body count, to discover that one bad dad has simply been replaced with another.
If you grew up worshipping movies like J.R. Bookwalter’s The Dead Next Door, you’ll feel right at home. Packed with rotting flesh, visible skeletons, slimy splatter, and handcrafted creature designs that elevate the Corpse beyond a Spirit Store rubber zombie, this may look cheap but never becomes cheap. Bayless didn’t play it safe for his feature debut; he shoved corpses, demons, gore and divine assassination into this and made it sing high falsetto.
Bonus points for the Corpse looking like he walked—I mean, he was carried—straight out of Reanimator Academy.
What a surprise!
You can buy this from MVD.
