Review of Movie Review of Buddy

Hey Boys and Girls, I know. I know. It has been a while since I have done one of these. But, for the record, I retired from doing movie reviews full time when Sally was hired to replace me. I have been perfectly happy sitting back, watching movies, and letting somebody else deal with the responsibility of telling you what is worth your time and what should be tossed into the cinematic dumpster fire.
Then I watched Buddy.
Every once in a great while, a movie comes along that is so twisted, so disturbing, and so completely different that I feel almost obligated to crawl out of retirement and talk about it. I am talking about movies like The Blair Witch Project, High Tension, and Saw. Movies that begin as something small, sometimes made with limited resources, and somehow manage to grow beyond what anyone probably expected. They become something people talk about years later.
So, what movie am I rambling about?
A movie I would bet you a dollar most of you have never even heard of.
Buddy.
How in the hell do I explain this ocular onslaught?
Do you remember that old playground song that went, "I hate you, you hate me, let's get together and kill Barney"? You know the one. The song every kid who had grown tired of that giant purple dinosaur eventually learned.
Yeah.
That pretty much explains Buddy to a tee.
Imagine somebody looked at Barney, those painfully cheerful children's television programs from the 1980s and 1990s, and asked one very simple question: what if the lovable mascot was actually a homicidal psychopath?
That is Buddy.
The film is written by Casper Kelly and Jamie King, with Kelly directing, and if that name sounds familiar, he is the warped mind responsible for Too Many Cooks. Buddy takes that same ability to start with something familiar and slowly twist it into something deeply wrong, then stretches it into a full-length horror comedy.
The movie takes us back to 1999, where a group of children live inside the strange episodic reality of a television program called It's Buddy! Their host is Buddy, a giant bright orange humanoid unicorn with a purple heart planted directly on his chest. Buddy lives in his ridiculous clubhouse, sings songs, teaches lessons, and expects everybody around him to smile and participate.
There is just one problem.
Buddy does not take rejection very well.
When one of the children refuses to play along, cracks begin to form in Buddy's colorful little universe. The cheerful children's show begins falling apart, and the kids slowly realize that the happy orange unicorn running their lives is not exactly the friendly television character they thought he was.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Grace, played by Cristin Milioti, begins to suspect that something is horribly wrong with her family. She has the feeling that someone is missing, even though she cannot completely explain who or why. That mystery eventually begins connecting her suburban life to Buddy's bizarre television nightmare. Topher Grace appears as her husband Ben, while Keegan-Michael Key provides Buddy's voice. Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt also lend their voices to some of the wonderfully bizarre characters inhabiting this thing.
Now, based solely on that description, this movie should have been a disaster.
Seriously.
There are about a thousand different ways this concept could have gone wrong. It could have become a cheap Barney parody stretched twenty minutes beyond the joke. It could have relied completely on gore. It could have leaned too heavily into nostalgia. It could have become one of those movies that thinks being weird automatically makes it clever.
Somehow, Casper Kelly avoids almost all of those traps.
The Barney comparison is obvious. You would have to be blind not to see it. But Buddy uses that idea as a starting point instead of the entire joke. Kelly takes the fake children's television program and gradually turns it into something much stranger, darker, and more ambitious.
The imaginary television world is one of the best parts of the movie. Everything is bright, colorful, cheap-looking, and intentionally artificial. The sets look like something children would have watched on television thirty years ago. Everything appears safe.
Until it does not.
That is where the movie gets you.
There is something naturally unsettling about watching a giant smiling character surrounded by children who are expected to remain happy every second of the day. Once the children begin showing real emotions, especially fear, anger, and confusion, Buddy's entire philosophy starts falling apart.
The transitions between the television program and Grace's real life are also handled extremely well. Kelly does not simply cut between two unrelated stories and hope they eventually meet somewhere in the middle. The two realities slowly begin bleeding into one another.
And then everything gets completely insane.
The movie also throws in pieces of The Wizard of Oz, children's adventure stories, puppet shows, horror films, and television nostalgia without feeling like somebody dumped a box of references onto the floor and called it a screenplay. Several reviews have pointed out the movie's connection to shows like Barney & Friends, while also recognizing that it pushes far beyond simple parody.
And let me talk about the production design for a second.
Holy crap.
The production design is fantastic.
I am not exaggerating when I say somebody deserves serious recognition for creating this television nightmare. Everything looks intentionally manufactured without looking lazy. The clubhouse, costumes, creatures, props, practical effects, and environments all feel like pieces of some forgotten children's program somebody found buried on an old VHS tape.
Then somebody poured blood all over it.
The cinematography also deserves credit because it knows exactly when something should look like cheap children's television and when it should begin feeling cinematic and threatening. The soundtrack works for the same reason. Everything cheerful slowly becomes uncomfortable.
Even the child actors surprised me.
I am usually nervous whenever a movie depends heavily on child performers because one weak performance can drag everything down. That does not happen here. The kids have to play characters performing inside a television show while also gradually realizing that they might actually be prisoners inside it. That is a difficult balance, and they pull it off.
Now, before everybody runs out and watches this thing based entirely on what I am saying, understand something.
Buddy is not going to be for everybody.
Not even close.
Some people are going to watch twenty minutes of this and wonder what kind of drugs the filmmakers were taking. Other people are going to hate the tonal shifts. Some will probably think the whole thing is stupid.
I completely understand that.
But if you like strange horror, dark comedy, practical effects, bizarre television satire, or Too Many Cooks, you need to see this movie.
Buddy currently carries an R rating, runs about 95 minutes, and has earned strong critical notices since its 2026 release. Rotten Tomatoes currently lists it at 88 percent from critics, which tells me I am definitely not the only lunatic who thinks Kelly pulled this thing off.
I honestly believe this is one of those movies people are going to stumble across years from now and say, "How the hell did I never hear about this?"
It is violent.
It is funny.
It is disturbing.
It is ridiculous.
And somehow all of those things fit together.
So, yeah, Sally can keep the movie review job.
But every once in a while, something like Buddy comes along and drags me back into the chair.
And this one was worth coming out of retirement for.