Synopsis: Inside the pastel world of the children’s show It’s Buddy!, a group of kids sing, dance and help a bright orange unicorn spread happiness. When one child refuses to play along, the cracks in that world start showing, and they bleed.
Stars: Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Clint Howard
Director: Casper Kelly
Rated: R
Running Length: 95 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Casper Kelly’s send-up of children’s television is weird, twisted and darkly funny, with a voice performance from Keegan-Michael Key that keeps finding new places to go. It runs a little long and detours where it shouldn’t, but the imagery sticks. 
Buddy Review: A Confession First
Here’s the part where we get personal, the bit where I share something about myself that endears you, the reader, to me, the writer. Well, actually, it’s where you feel that. I have no idea who you are.
Anyway. I’m going to tell you something I don’t tell many people. Partly because it only happened once. Partly because I regret that it happened at all.
When I was a junior in high school, I played Barney at a 10-year-old’s birthday party.
It was one of the most miserable days of my life. Not because the costume was hot. Not because the head was so big I looked more like a bobblehead than a dinosaur and could only see out of his mouth. And not because the previous occupant had barfed in it, and that smell does not come out of fabric.
No, it was because the kids loved pushing poor Barney over. And punching Barney in a spot that would have finished off the dinosaurs on its own, asteroid or no asteroid. With the head sitting the way it did, I never saw any of it coming.
Ninety minutes of hell.
So when the orange unicorn in Buddy goes on a rampage, I’ll admit I empathized more than I probably should have.
Pee-Wee's Playhouse, But Weirder
Casper Kelly‘s film drops you straight into the fuzzy, gauzy world of It’s Buddy! and his four kid helpers. Household objects talk. Plants talk. A life-size pink bunny hops around. A mailman stops by to put mail in the talking mailbox.
Picture Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, but weirder. Yes, weirder. You’ve got the right idea.
Soon enough you sense something is off. There’s tension on the set. Buddy seems more interested in business than play. When he doesn’t get his way, he recasts the show, and he leaves a bloody trail doing it. The kids aren’t the only ones at risk. Inanimate objects get the chop too if they talk back.
Two resourceful tykes, played by Delaney Quinn and Caleb “C.J.” Williams, work out that their friends are disappearing and not coming back. They learn the truth about Buddy too late. The real mystery isn’t what Buddy wants. It’s how they got on the show in the first place, where they came from, and whether there’s a way back.
Kelly Knows Exactly What He's Doing
The director’s statement explains the whole film. Kelly says that as a kid he envied the children who seemed to live inside those shows, then started noticing what was off about them. How did the kids know to follow the story? What if they didn’t want to? Why does no child in one of those shows ever make a fart joke?
He frames children’s entertainment as a form of propaganda running back to Grimm, and he’s not entirely joking. Even well-meaning entertainment tells us how to feel and sets the agenda for what we think about. Buddy takes that thesis and gives it teeth.
Keegan-Michael Key (Wonka) does the heaviest lifting. His Buddy is all wacky, deluded charm on the surface. Key knows precisely when to let that television cadence slip into something with an edge on it. Familiar voices keep turning up as the residents of this strange little world, including Clint Howard and Patton Oswalt.
Kuperstein, Puppets and a 4:3 Frame
The craft here is better than a movie about a murderous unicorn has any obligation to be. Zach Kuperstein, who shot Barbarian, gives the show-within-the-show a low-rent analog look. The boxy 4:3 frame will send anyone over thirty straight back to a Saturday morning. Anna Kathleen‘s production design sells the pastel clubhouse completely.
Devon Hawkes Ludlow designed and performed the puppets, and he’s an Emmy winner who also plays Charlie the Train. Michael Yezerski scored it, with original songs by Shawn Coleman of Squidbillies and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is exactly the right pedigree. Josh Ethier is the editor that brings together a lot of different elements/formats and makes them cohesive.
Kelly also finds some striking images with Buddy himself. There were several moments late in the film when Buddy has been worn down where I found myself thinking about Jaws 2, of all things. Something about the way Buddy looms over the kids turns a colorful, familiar shape into a genuine threat.
Where It Loses the Thread, and Where to Watch It
Even at 95 minutes the film runs a little long, and the central joke thins out faster than you want it to. You almost don’t want to see it slip, because it builds up so much goodwill early.
The bigger issue is a detour. Kelly and co-writer Jamie King swing away from Buddy’s world into the real one, centering on Cristin Milioti‘s character. That has nothing to do with the performances. Milioti is excellent, and Topher Grace as her husband never betrays the tricky tone. I just wanted some of the extra air let out of this squishy, not-quite-huggable horror comedy. Quinn is compelling enough on her own that I’d have followed her the whole way.
This is one I’d wait to watch at home. So much of it is deliberately grainy, tape-recorded imagery that a big-screen TV may serve the effect better than a theater screen ever could. And at long last I can watch a violent Barney stand-in without worrying about some 10-year-old sucker-punching me in the dinosaur nuts.
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