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Even when I was a kid, I found Barney pretty creepy. In fact, there were a lot of ’90s live-action shows geared toward children that just felt a little off. Teletubbies. Lamb Chop’s Play-Along. I mean, Pee-wee’s Playhouse seems like it maybe should be illegal. Apparently Buddy writer-director Casper Kelly feels similarly, as his feature debut effectively uses the framework of off-putting children’s television to craft a supernatural comedy slasher that pokes fun at the inherent creepiness of kids’ entertainment. The eponymous Buddy is a singing and dancing orange unicorn, done up in that guy-in-a-mascot-suit aesthetic that was everywhere in the ’90s, who teaches the youngins on his show important life lessons, like how being brave requires you to first be scared. When one of his kid costars refuses to heed that lesson and learn to dance, Buddy brutally murders him offscreen. His next song is about cleaning up.
The elementary-aged kids trapped on It’s Buddy!, including the skeptical Freddy (Delaney Quinn) and courageous Wade (Caleb Williams), soon catch on that something is definitely wrong with their oversized orange friend. They discover evidence of his violence, including the blood-soaked book belonging to their now-missing costar, discarded inside the anthropomorphic trash can aptly named Trashy. Suddenly they’re less enthusiastic about singing songs declaring how much they love Buddy. This enrages the jumbo orange unicorn, who flies into a murderous rage and finally reveals the violent presence hiding beneath all that forced positivity. The kids gather their courage and make for the distant Diamond City in a desperate bid to escape, realizing along the way that they have no memories of a life lived before their appearance on It’s Buddy!
It takes a good while for Kelly’s film to finally break out of its cheapo ’90s kids-show aesthetic and reenter the real world, but when it does, the transition is jarring. After multiple episodes locked inside It’s Buddy!, the sharp definition and muted colors outside the screen stand in stark contrast to the technicolor miasma within it. There we meet Cristin Milioti’s Grace, a mother struggling with the suspicion that something inside her family is deeply wrong. The dinner table looks conspicuously incomplete, but no one else in her family, including husband Ben (Topher Grace) and their two boys, seems to notice anything missing. She foregoes therapy for a psychic who confirms her suspicions: something terrible has happened here. It’s not long before Grace herself gets sucked through the television and winds up the newest brain-wiped townsperson inside It’s Buddy!.
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Conceptually, Buddy carves out its own strange little lane within the horror sphere. Kelly pulls liberally from the likes of Barney, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and all those slightly off-putting children’s shows whose manic, plastered-on smiles and foam-rubber mascots always seemed ripe for urban legends about the actors inside finally snapping. Turning that aesthetic into a full-on slasher is pretty inspired, particularly when the chirpy lessons and forced positivity collide directly with grisly violence. The movie’s best joke may simply be how little Buddy and his aggressively sunny worldview have to change before becoming genuinely threatening.
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Buddy is rough around the edges, arguably by design, but it’s also funny, genuinely strange, and occasionally gnarly in ways that make its low-rent aesthetic actively part of the charm. There’s something wonderfully wrong about watching anthropomorphic furniture with giant googly eyes get brutally torn apart, or seeing Buddy mutate into his grotesque final form, with the practical effects throughout admirably achieved and genuinely fun. Kelly also wisely resists over-explaining the mythology. Diamond City, Buddy himself, and the rules governing this bizarre little universe are mostly presented as-is, without some laborious third-act explanation of why any of it exists. That restraint works in the movie’s favor. Buddy may not explore every corner of its own weirdness, but it has enough originality, laughs, and splattery imagination to make the whole experiment worth a trip down one seriously demented memory lane.
The post ‘BUDDY’ Turns Barney-Style Kids TV Into Slasher Horror appeared first on Silver Screen Riot.
