When the smiling stops, Buddy starts killing.
Now, Buddy is a film I’ve been patiently waiting for since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. I loved Casper Kelly’s segment in V/H/S Halloween, “Fun Size,” and this felt like a natural next step from that delightfully unhinged sensibility. More importantly, I’m fascinated by the premise that taps directly into the bizarre cultural hatred/love surrounding Barney’s meteoric rise from the early ’90s through the late aughts. Barney is obviously the template here, and Buddy understands that there’s something inherently terrifying—and hilarious—about taking a beloved children’s character whose omnipresence became almost inescapable and asking what happens if that creature was always as sinister as we imagined.
The film also feels like it borrows a bit from Robin Comisar’s mini-masterpiece Great Choice, a short that essentially traps its characters inside a looped VHS Red Lobster commercial, forcing them to endlessly repeat the same cheerful cycle of shrimp and seafood interactions until, well, they don’t. Buddy takes that same concept of weaponized retro-repetition and applies it to children’s television, where every song, smile, dance, and hug becomes increasingly horrifying the more often we’re forced to endure it.
The first act plays out like a handful of episodes of It’s Buddy, complete with saccharine songs, overly aggressive enthusiasm, and the sort of overly cheerful educational programming that feels engineered in a laboratory to make adults slowly lose their minds. That façade splinters when one of the children refuses to put on his magic dancing shoes—and Buddy kills him off-camera. When the other children discover the missing boy’s belongings covered in blood and tossed into Trashy the trashcan, the message becomes clear: something is very, very wrong with their beloved unicorn.
As the loops continue, Buddy is eventually wounded and revealed to be a giant orange homicidal unicorn, leaving the children too terrified to hug him or participate in the episode’s finale singalong. Without the children completing this ritual, the episode can’t properly end, which triggers both the credits and a reset for Buddy—who remains hideously disfigured. It’s a wonderfully nasty escalation, turning the familiar mechanics of children’s television into a kind of supernatural prison. The rules are simple: smile, sing, dance, hug Buddy, and pretend everything is fine. Refuse, and something terrible happens.
Eventually, some of the children manage to escape the show and attempt to make their way to the far off Diamond City for help, only to discover that getting out of Buddy’s world doesn’t necessarily mean they’re safe from Buddy himself. He begins hunting them outside the confines of the show, transforming what was once a brightly colored fantasy world into something closer to a slasher.
For the most part, Buddy works. It sags a bit in the middle, and the ending ultimately falls somewhat flat, largely because the technical limitations of the final iteration of Buddy undercut some of the menace the film has so carefully built. Still, the children trapped inside Buddy’s television world are surprisingly effective as the film’s emotional and narrative anchors, often carrying the story and even pushing some of its darker sequences further than expected.
And then there’s Buddy himself.
Voiced by Keegan-Michael Key, Buddy exists in that perfect space between aggressively DIY wholesome and deeply unsettling, with Key finding just the right balance of manic whimsy and creeping dread. More importantly, the character design feels ripped straight from the era that inspired him, which makes the horror work that much better. Buddy understands that the most unsettling thing about these characters isn’t necessarily that they’re monsters—it’s that they’re supposed to be our friends.
There’s something funny and deeply disturbing about watching children slowly realize that the giant orange unicorn they’ve been taught to love is also perfectly capable of murdering them. The first half understands this instinctively, finding genuine horror in the idea that Buddy can simply decide one of his young friends is no longer playing along and eliminate them.
Unfortunately, the film starts to lose that simplicity in its second half. As Buddy moves toward its conclusion, it becomes increasingly interested in explaining itself—where Buddy came from, how the rules work, and how exactly these characters might be defeated. The more mythology it piles on, the less potent the central premise becomes. What begins as a wonderfully simple nightmare about being trapped inside a children’s TV show eventually becomes preoccupied with figuring out how to turn that nightmare into a larger franchise.
Still, there’s plenty to enjoy here. Buddy is at its best when it embraces the absurdity of its premise and remembers there’s something wonderfully perverse about taking the visual language of ’90s children’s programming—the songs, the repetition, the bright colors, the forced positivity—and slowly revealing the nightmare hiding underneath.
Buddy may not stick the landing, but when it’s firing on all cylinders, it’s a gleefully twisted reminder that sometimes the scariest thing in the room is the thing insisting, with a giant smile plastered across its face, that everything is going to be okay.
