Buddy Review: It’s Buddy! And Casper Kelly Knows Exactly What He’s Doing

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

Someone involved with Buddy must have spent an ungodly amount of time watching children’s television. Barney, Dora the Explorer, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, probably every aggressively cheerful show where a smiling thing teaches children how to share while adults pretend this is all perfectly normal.

Casper Kelly doesn’t just remember those shows. He understands their machinery: the smiling adults, bright primary colors, gentle lessons, repetitive songs and that weird forced positivity where everybody is having fun because the show says everybody is having fun. Then he takes little pieces of all of it, especially Barney, and starts twisting.

Frankly, he does it almost perfectly.

Buddy begins inside It’s Buddy!, a children’s television show from 1999 starring a giant orange unicorn named Buddy. Keegan-Michael Key provides the voice, and the whole thing looks and sounds remarkably convincing as cheap late-’90s children’s television. The clothes are right. The sets are right. The video texture is right. Even the little bits of filler and educational nonsense feel like something I could have stumbled across on television as a kid.

That accuracy matters because parody works better when the filmmaker actually understands the thing being mutilated.

One of the kids, Josh, doesn’t want to dance. That’s it. He just doesn’t feel like doing the dance, which is probably one of the most authentic things a kid could do in this world of mandatory happiness.

Buddy does not appreciate this.

The movie doesn’t waste much time letting the cracks show. The quick turn involving Nurse Nancy is great because Kelly doesn’t spend half the movie teasing us with whether Buddy might secretly be dangerous. We know what kind of movie we bought a ticket for. Let the unicorn get to work.

“You murdered the nurse.”

Yeah. He did.

The fire sequence works. The mailman stuff works. Watching Buddy dance around with a dead body somehow works. There’s a fine line between an actual horror-comedy and a 95-minute joke that amounts to “What if Barney murdered people?”, and Buddy stays on the right side of that line because Kelly knows the material down to the bones.

The real joke isn’t simply that Buddy kills people. It’s that he can do horrible things and still maintain the same cheerful, faintly condescending personality of a children’s television host who cannot comprehend why you don’t want to sing along.

That’s much creepier.

The 1999 setting is also exactly right. Put this in the present and half the joke disappears. The late ’90s were still this weird period where children’s television could be cheap, tactile, colorful and slightly unsettling without anyone intending for it to be unsettling.

Then Buddy makes its first major move and leaves that world behind.

Kelly changes the visual language along with the story, moving through 1.33:1, 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 as the realities shift. The boxier television image makes It’s Buddy! feel contained and artificial, and when the frame opens up it genuinely feels as though somebody changed the channel and we’ve fallen into another kind of movie.

Then Cristin Milioti shows up as Grace, and the movie suddenly has an emotional center I wasn’t expecting.

Milioti has been killing it lately, and at this point saying she’s good almost feels redundant. There’s a moment where Grace becomes fixated on an empty chair at the dinner table because she knows, without being able to prove it, that somebody should be sitting there. Her screaming at that empty chair is one of the most haunting things in a movie that also contains a murderous unicorn.

The chair is just empty. That’s enough.

Topher Grace plays her husband, Ben, and he remains extremely good at playing a smart-ass who can make being technically reasonable feel incredibly irritating. As Grace becomes convinced that something impossible has happened to their family, Ben mocks how far her thinking has gone, asking what’s next, conspiracy photos all over the wall connected by strings.

It’s funny because, from his perspective, what she’s saying sounds completely insane. A television unicorn has somehow taken their child and erased the evidence that the kid ever existed.

Unfortunately for Ben, he’s in a Casper Kelly movie.

The television sequence that follows is wild. Kelly plays with the boundary between the television image and Grace’s reality in a way that feels tactile and deeply wrong. The screen isn’t just a spooky object anymore. It becomes a physical border between worlds.

Meanwhile, the children outside Buddy’s world are discovering all sorts of normal human things they apparently never had to deal with inside a children’s television show. At one point Strappy, the talking backpack voiced by Patton Oswalt, asks, “What’s a penis?”

Perfect.

Then Clint Howard appears.

Fucking Clint Howard.

Now we have Clint Howard hanging around with Willie, a marionette voiced by Michael Shannon, which is already the kind of casting decision that makes me happy this movie exists.

Then somebody makes out with the puppet. The flowers are drugs. The kids start tripping.

Sure.

What I appreciate is that it never feels like Kelly is reaching into a hat and pulling out random weird shit because random automatically equals funny. There’s recognizable children’s-story logic underneath everything: friendly characters encountered along a journey, a talking companion, a strange man in the woods, magical flowers, a destination everybody believes will solve their problems.

Kelly knows exactly what he’s perverting.

That’s where Buddy separates itself from a lot of nostalgia-based horror. There’s a difference between remembering that Barney existed and understanding how Barney worked. Kelly understands the cadence, repetition, forced participation and relentless reassurance of children’s television. Something like Pee-wee’s Playhouse was already about two inches away from a fever dream before anybody added murder.

Once you know the rules that well, breaking them becomes much more satisfying.

The movie isn’t flawless. There are moments after leaving the original It’s Buddy! setup where I missed the simplicity of that first section. The more mythology the film starts building, the greater the risk that the wonderfully stupid purity of “Buddy is not happy with you” gets buried underneath a bigger story.

But Kelly keeps finding new directions before the idea goes stale.

And then there’s the third act.

I know it says SPOILERS THROUGHOUT at the top of this review. I still don’t want to tell you what happens.

You should see it.

The final stretch is wild, and part of why it worked for me was realizing the movie still had another gear after I thought I understood how strange it was willing to become. I don’t want to rob anybody of that realization just so I can describe every beat.

What I will say is that Buddy isn’t afraid to look ridiculous, and that willingness to take a genuinely stupid idea seriously enough to execute it well is becoming one of my favorite things about horror right now.

I keep saying we’re in another golden age of horror, and I’m definitely not the only person saying it. Maybe “golden age” gets thrown around too easily, but horror still feels like one of the few genres where filmmakers are routinely allowed to take creative risks and get really fucking weird with them.

Apparently that can mean Clint Howard in the woods with a Michael Shannon puppet while children eat psychedelic flowers and a homicidal orange unicorn hunts them.

That’s healthy.

I don’t want every horror movie to be Buddy. I’m not even sure anybody other than Casper Kelly should attempt something like Buddy. I just want more movies willing to take this kind of swing.

Kelly’s Too Many Cooks already showed how good he is at taking familiar television language and slowly poisoning it. Buddy feels like that impulse given feature-film resources and enough room to become much more ambitious. Sometimes that extra room works against him, but more often than not I was impressed by how controlled the movie remains while appearing completely out of control.

The technical side deserves a lot of credit for that. Cinematographer Zach Kuperstein has to make several visual worlds feel distinct without reducing them to obvious filters, while editor Josh Ethier somehow keeps the movie coherent as it keeps mutating into something else.

It takes good filmmakers to make something this stupid.

I mean that as a compliment.

The cast understands it too. Milioti gives the movie genuine emotional weight. Topher Grace knows exactly how irritating to make Ben without turning him into a cartoon. Key’s voice keeps Buddy cheerful enough that his violence stays funny and uncomfortable instead of becoming generic mascot horror.

Patton Oswalt is a backpack. Michael Shannon is a puppet. Clint Howard is Clint Howard.

What else do you need?

I went into Buddy expecting something fun and got something stranger, meaner and considerably more inventive. Kelly knows his subject material well enough that the parody never feels like somebody vaguely remembering children’s television and adding blood to it.

He knows where the comfort came from.

That’s why he knows where to stick the knife.

Add Buddy to the must-watch horror list for 2026. I’ll probably be thinking about that third act for a while.

7.9/10

Critical Screening was provided a screener of Buddy for review purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4wFMteQwWY