MVD Visual: My Only Friend's a Corpse (2025) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of MVD Visual

You probably haven’t heard of first-time actor-writer-director-special effects artist Jack Bayless and that’s okay.  Initially the visual effects artist for writer-director Shane Wallace’s 2024 horror-comedy A Very Flattened Christmas before mounting his first hour long do-it-yourself fantasy-horror comedy romp a year later with My Only Friend’s a Corpse, the young newcomer’s debut feature is a surprising little quickie.  On paper it sounds like Swiss Army Man with its unlikely farting corpse coming of age friendship but in practice is kinda like the cadaver version of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey involving a rubber corpse that talks without the need to, you know, move its mouth?  Aiming to be an insta-cult horror ala Jimmy and Stiggs with prosthetic puppets, gore and neon lit splatter effects, it might get your attention with some of the fantasy lore worked into the narrative but mostly it wasn’t much to write home about.

 
Danny (Sam Christensen) is a runaway punk teenager who on his sojourn runs into what appears to be a talking rotting corpse.  Nudging the youth towards shouldering him towards a path of vengeance that will involve crossing paths with man eating demon monsters, rednecks, forest creatures and eventually God himself (itself?), all told through the follies of journeying through the American Midwest.  A little bit like what would happen if a horror comedy invaded the worlds of Blake Eckard and their rancid stench of scum, My Only Friend’s a Corpse despite being plainly cheap and like an underground backyard movie at times is well lit with decent gore effects when needed including a character who is torn limb from limb simply for giving Danny a lift.

 
Co-starring some of the filmmakers like assistant director Brayden Copp with decent 1.78:1 digital cinematography by Isaiah Thornburg, a negligible score by Riley McCandless who also handled the foley effects and editing and visual effects by the writer-director himself who makes a cameo as an unlucky prisoner, what you see is what you get here.  My Only Friend’s a Corpse, surely images on the coverbox with its collectible slipcover and reversible sleeve art imply a pretty silly time.  Still, if I told you the corpse itself wasn’t much more than a Spirit Halloween looking decoration without mobility other than a whispering lost voice, you’d probably pass on this.  The weird developments involving a well-dressed oversized curly haired man giving our hero a ride while transforming into a Hulk kind of monster decimating people on the way are fun but the initial premise with an inanimate yet somehow talking corpse rings kinda lousy.

 
That’s not to say the Blu-ray disc release is subpar, however, with decent looking video and 2.0 stereo sound, an audio commentary from the film’s writer-director and a fourteen-minute cast-and-crew featurette detailing the shoestring production.  I always love me a fun no-budget horror flick and with October finally here this most certainly fulfilled the task at hand.  I just wish they could’ve done more with the monsters and demons than an obviously inexpensive looking rubber latex prop with limited mobility or detail.  Not even its eyes move.  Sure there’s the joke of dressing the corpse in a sweater and hat and later on there are some twists and turns involving the corpse’s truer mercurial intentions, but for running just over an hour the conceit felt like starter pack Joe Begos with a fraction of his resourcefulness or visual command.  I wasn’t bored but the end result was kind of underwhelming.  To each their own.

--Andrew Kotwicki