“Buddy” Review: The Kids’ Show Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Casper Kelly’s Buddy is a mind-bending journey into a very dark version of children’s television.

Back in 2014, Casper Kelly gave the world “Too Many Cooks,” an 11-minute dive into aging television conventions that swam deeper into a twisted darkness the longer it went on. It seemed a fun inheritor of some of what Tim & Eric had done, and even Kentucky Fried Movie long before them — a kind of postmodern sifting through the wreckage of media culture, with a demonically humorous throughline.

Kelly’s new feature film, Buddy, is cut from the same cloth… or VHS tape. Things are slightly more grounded in one single kids’ TV show, titled Buddy, clearly a spoof of the 1990s character and series Barney.

Buddy is an orange unicorn living in a playhouse-type world of anthropomorphic creatures and furniture, and of course, naive children there to learn lessons. Things go sideways when one of the kids doesn’t want to engage in the happy-go-lucky lesson-learning activities and suffers a violent fate at Buddy’s hands.

A twisting tale

After things go sideways, they zig-zag, go upside-down, and land in places that maybe no one but Casper Kelly himself really understands. That said, one gets the distinct impression that Kelly does understand it, and knows precisely how this strange universe of his works. Meanings and rules aren’t spelled out literally, but we get a strong sense of metaphor — a powerful tool rarely employed by the modern filmmaker, if at all.

The film eventually combines many elements from many a kids’ show, with appearances from characters that harken back to the days of “It’s Howdy Doody Time,” as well as other more recent 90s hits like “Dora.” There is something familiar for a child of any era, and that something has been turned into comically strange nightmare fuel.

Delaney Quinn carries much of the film on her young shoulders as Freddy, the girl in Buddy’s show who starts putting together the pieces and trying to “get out.” Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace fit into the story from an entirely different angle we won’t spoil here, but suffice it to say they anchor the craziness to something more grounded, with Milioti getting some genuinely powerful stuff to do on her own.

Cartoony vibes

One notable sequence belongs to a parapsychologist character portrayed by Brooke Bloom, with a combination of humor and earnestness that stitches together the ridiculous and the psychologically honest.

Voice work by Patton Oswalt, Eric Bauza, and of course, Keegan-Michael Key as Buddy himself, rounds out the cartoony vibes.

Buddy’s flaw could be how long it takes before dropping enough breadcrumbs, and then how many breadcrumbs start coming at us all at once later. It’s hard to imagine that most audiences won’t struggle with the “rules of the game” within Kelly’s universe, but this kind of bizarre is such a breath of fresh air in a world that keeps us locked into the same cinematic universes with the same characters, seemingly in an endless feedback loop — which is kind of what the movie is about in the first place.

Audiences should go see “Buddy,” but they should go in with the expectation that things won’t make perfect sense, and that they’ll be called upon to draw some of their own conclusions about why the film exists and what exactly it’s holding a mirror up to. There are, of course, also laughs to be had — or shocks, depending on your taste and sense of humor.

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