Directed by Casper Kelly
The set up of Buddy should be familiar to most everyone, it’s about a small group of children in a whimsical TV show where lessons are learned, fun is had, and songs are sung. Think Barney, Teletubbies, that sort of thing. While most everything seems perfectly wholesome on the outside, it becomes clear extremely quickly that, shockingly, this mystical orange unicorn isn’t quite as lovely and caring as everyone believes. Once the children realize that something isn’t quite right here, it sets them down a dangerous path of self discovery that will take all of their courage, teamwork, and perseverance to survive.
I’ll be upfront here and lay my cards on the table: I adore Buddy. I love weird premises, weird monsters, weird situations, and Buddy has that in spades. Just the idea of an evil Barney-esque children’s show host as a monstrous figure in a mainstream horror movie that I saw in a movie theater is wild to me, and, while I won’t spoil the details, the strangeness of the entire movie only gets ratcheted up as it escalates every aspect. That’s one of my favorite things about Buddy, that it is fully committed to everything it is setting out to do and refuses to ever wink at the camera and say ‘heh, isn’t an evil kids show host a silly concept?’ Part of what makes that work is how much the movie understands how to be a comedy horror.
Comedy horror is one of the more surprisingly controversial subgenres of horror movies. Usually, people have problems with these types of movies because the horror and comedy aspects feel like two separate things happening in different parts of the movie without marrying the concepts, and movies like that tend to be bad, but Buddy isn’t like that. Buddy’s greatest strength is understanding that comedy and horror are the same thing. The same absurdity that makes scenes funny makes them scary, and the confidence to commit to that makes both feelings hit even harder. While the absurdity of the premise is obvious from a comedic standpoint, there is an undercurrent of satire about children’s programming that hits far too close to home and lands that scuzzy horror feel.
This absurdity isn’t just managed by the premise though, everything is working together to accomplish this goal, and the piece that does the heaviest lifting for me is the visual design. Buddy’s visual design is perfection. While the mascot characters all look great, it’s the larger world that nails the whimsical and welcoming but still a bit unhinged and vaguely threatening look that keeps the energy up. It’s refreshing to see a completely practical effects driven showcase like this where the whole time I’m watching the movie and just wanting to see what the next bit of this crazy world looks like. Not just for the comedy, but for how it drives the visual storytelling that’s such a huge part of the movie. It’s great too how this worldbuilding doesn’t just apply to the visuals, the editing and music all match this concept of a slowly unravelling children’s show, particularly at the beginning.
What’s interesting is that even though this is a slasher movie, technically, the majority of what’s scary doesn’t come from the violence or gore. Sure, they’re both here, and they’re pretty good at that, but the atmosphere is far scarier than Buddy himself. There’s this dueling pair of feelings that Buddy manages to achieve, one being terror at being chased by something much stronger than you with powers that you can’t even fully understand, while the other feeling is this sense of real wonder as you’re exploring a world that’s been kept from you your whole life. In a lot of ways, this feels so much like an actual childhood experience, where so much stuff is happening beyond your control and understanding, and you’re retreating into this separate world to get away from it. It all resonates very strongly with me, and it definitely shows that there was more to the writing for this movie than just a “what if Barney was evil” concept.
Most of the movie follows a small group of children as they’re trying to find safety, which gives these kids a chance to flex their surprisingly good acting talents. It’s always wild to think about how far child acting has come over the years, to the point where now child actors are pulling off emotionally complicated roles and acting like an actor acting like a different actor, which was kind of essential to making the movie work. That’s not to say anyone else was bad, Keegan-Michael Key was great as Buddy’s voice actor, and the rest of the cast was also generally excellent. Speaking of the cast, there was one legendary actor who showed up for only a few scenes and stole the show, but I won’t spoil exactly who it was or what happened.
If I’m being critical, and I have to be, there was only one sequence that didn’t really work for me, and unsurprisingly, it was one that took place in the “real world” without any of the child main characters. It was a sequence that I guess was important for explaining some of the lore, which there is a shocking amount of, but it didn’t work well for me because it fell into the old trap of it being a “stock scene” where there’s a specific setup where a woman thinks something supernatural is happening (because of course there is, it’s a movie) her husband doesn’t believe her and acts like a dick before she is proven right. I hate that type of scene so much, it has appeared in a million movies and never feels unique enough to justify its own existence, especially in this movie where the majority of the film has an incredibly distinct feeling to it but then we switch over to this completely different setting and it jostles the pacing quite badly.
Aside from that, I can’t criticize too much. One of the best things about Buddy is how it makes me think about horror comedy. Sometimes the line between comedy and horror can be thin, so it makes sense that some of the best horror from the past decade (Get Out, Barbarian, Obsession) has its roots in creators who came from comedy. Buddy is squarely following down this path, and I’m really excited to see where this team is going to go next. A sequel could work, the ending certainly leaves room for it, but even if Buddy is just a one-off, it can certainly stand on its own two hooves as one of the new great horror-comedies. And thank god for that, everyone, because I was getting desperate for a decent movie.
