Loyalty is the key to friendship. A person’s willingness to stick by someone else, to ride shotgun with them and to have their back when they are acting questionably, committing crimes, or even conducting an iconoclastic mission that might bring down the very foundations of reality, is the true test of being a friend. As the very title of writer/director Jack Bayless’ debut feature My Only Friend’s a Corpse implies, its protagonist Danny (Sam Christensen) has no friends until he meets the Corpse – and the fact that the Corpse is essentially an inert body that Danny has to carry around like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and is also – again like a ventriloquist’s dummy – voiced by Christensen, might just suggest that there is something psychological, even solipsistic, underlying this friendship, as though the lonely, long-haired lollygagger is only really ever talking to himself and negotiating his own place in an arbitrary and unforgiving universe.
“I need you to help me kill God,” says the Corpse on their first meeting, significantly only a short time after Danny has sneaked from the home of his drunk, deadbeat dad (played by the film’s produce Key Tawn Toothman). It makes sense that Danny and the Corpse should join forces, as they are both already rebelling against paternal authority. The Corpse is out for revenge against the Ultimate Cause of his infernal indignity, reduced as he is to being a “a rotting skeleton next to a dumpster eating a dead dude”, while Danny is escaping the baleful, controlling influence of his father – and it is this struggle against the ills and iniquities of errant patriarchy that cements their odd-couple relationship, with Danny providing the humanity that the Corpse lacks.
Danny is repeatedly warned – by the Fisherman (Jayce Lamb) at the lake, by Gaia (Auryona Webb) in the forest and by the Angel (Brayden J Copp) on their tail – that this partnership is untrustworthy and that things are not what they seem. Indeed the Corpse repeatedly proves to be a trickster and a liar, and is obviously exploiting and manipulating the young man on whose back he rides. Still, Danny remains true to his new friend right to the bitter end, and shows a willingness to face “tribulation and turmoil”, to commit bloody murder, and not just to endure, but even to usher in, an apocalyptic revolution, all in the name of friendship. Yet faithful, loyal Danny is destined, like Jesus (with a body count!), to be betrayed, as one bad dad is merely replaced with another.
My Only Friend’s a Corpse lets its cosmic theomachy unfold in a banalised Midwest and on a very low budget. Aside from, or perhaps because of, all the cheap gore, strange lore and wild leaps in narrative logic, this plays like a stoner buddy comedy – and indeed, in one of several mid-credits codas, Danny and the Corpse are shown sharing a bong. That also defines the film’s ideal audience, hopped-up, spaced-out and turned-on to this weird trip through America’s backroads to the rundown house of God.
strap: Jack Bayless’ bloody stoner comedy sets a nobody and a revenant on a path to kill God in the American Midwest
© Anton Bitel
