Directed By Casper Kelly

Starring – Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace

The Plot – In 1999, a group of amnesiac children live in the episodic world of It’s Buddy!, a children’s television show hosted by the tyrannical Buddy, a bright orange, humanoid unicorn with a purple heart on his chest who lives in his wacky clubhouse. When the children begin to defy their captor after one of the kids disappears, Buddy grinds his teeth and sends them on a perilous journey to the mythical Diamond City. Meanwhile, in the real world, traumatized suburban mother Grace (Milioti) is drawn into Buddy’s abomination.

Rated R for bloody violence, some drug content and adult language all involving children.

BUDDY | Final Trailer (2026) | In Theaters FRIDAY!

POSITIVES

Very few years in the history of horror can effectively equal, let alone succeed, quite like this one, in terms of expanding upon the creative and immersive boundaries of the genre, and with Buddy conceptually pertaining to a dark and edgier side of educational TV programs that most of us grew up idolizing, Casper Kelly has once again found a compellingly untapped angle into our adolescent subconscious, in turn conjuring an exceptionally seamless presentation for mirrored likeness that proves the director definitely did his homework on the nuances of the programming. From the intentionally stalled and emotionally overzealous deliveries of its youthful protagonists, to a spontaneity of toe-tappingly infectious sing-a-longs, to larger-than-life costumes and wardrobe, to anthropomorphized characters, to even the token roles of each child bringing an ethnical value to the show’s all-inclusive forefront, everything about the production’s tangible familiarities made it feel directly plucked from Saturday morning showcases, all framed from the perspective as an audience member watching at home, and considering Kelly’s direction works marvelously towards fleshing out the naturally unnerving and manipulative tendencies of experiencing these moral-meandering shows now as an adult, he constantly finds cleverly limitless avenues of exploit to flesh out a rich balance of humorous and horrific over the integrity of the material, resulting in an infectiously over-the-top experience too unpredictably chaotic to not be charmed by. Kelly himself is no stranger to these kinds of shows, as his own experience on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim make this the next logical step for his feature length directorial debut, and between not only guiding the kind of aggressively exaggerated performances that he’s able to pluck from many first time child actors, as well as a stimulatingly stylistic production that makes this world of make-believe feel inescapable with purgatory parameters, Kelly has proved himself as another name on the wall of horror’s next generation of visionaries, proving that the hope and state of the genre is in good hands with daringly audacious filmmakers unafraid of making their audience uncomfortable with the premeditated actions on child vulnerability. Not to be outdone by colorful and disturbing direction, Kelly is also a co-writer on the screenplay, where through the repetitiously inescapable guidelines of the program episodic format, he’s able to muster an ample amount of Lynchian mystery pertaining to the operational realities of the how, when, and why these children are involved in such an overwhelming environment, with very little answers during an opening half hour that feels like three episodes of the fictional program condensed together to breed hopelessness for those involved. When the film finally does extend beyond the depths of its televised narrative, the surmised questioning only grows stronger while depicting an out-of-nowhere family household with its own unforeseen disturbances, and while Kelly and co-writer Jamie King eventually tie everything together for the advantageous insight of the audience, leading to a merging of worlds that makes the televised nightmare a reality for Milioti’s housewife character, who suddenly becomes faced with her own monumental task of saving the children and returning to her life of comfortable stability. As a navigational journey, the script doesn’t flesh everything out seamlessly, as some issues with inconsistencies and closure with the ending resolution ultimately leave slightly more to be desired in the consistency of its execution, but when it is creatively firing on all cylinders the movie finds expansively compelling ways to constantly maintain our vested interests, made easier by a breezily brisk 90-minute runtime that not only maintains urgency in the air of the storytelling, but also keeps the film from overstaying its welcome, despite some initial structural issues that will ultimately vary in the mileage of attainable momentum for everyone in the audience. If exceptional production values, daring direction, and a thought-provokingly expanding narrative journey aren’t enough, the movie also features some creatively innovative and gruesomely brutal kills that certainly earn every square inch of its intended R-rating, all the while cementing Buddy as the next horror icon hungry for the hunt. While Kelly’s aforementioned exaggerated tendencies as a director could easily allow the buckets of blood and tendon-stretched limbs to maintain an overzealously repetitious consistency, to the point of rendering them meaningless, I love that he saves the touches of violence for when they endearingly matter most to the impactful drama of a scene, typically at a time when the prolonged silence of a confrontational interaction seems ripe for spontaneous jolting jump scares throughout films of a lesser quality, and with the depicted anguish of those involved captained so hilariously surreal when spawning from an eight foot tall unicorn, it keeps the film from ever losing sight of the absurdity of it all, where the unavoidable hilarity from the audience seamlessly plays into the maniacal mayhem of its dangerous antagonist, in order to show how uncompromising and incorrigible he is towards listening to reason. While there’s so much tantalizing technique in every element of production behind the lens, there’s just as much displayed talent from those involved in front of it, specifically Keegan-Michael Key, who disappears deceptively into the vocal contortions of the titular character. Locked-in commitment doesn’t even begin to describe the level of authenticity that Key supplants to his artificially enthusiastic deliveries, with his most imposingly defining moments materializing in the form of passive-aggressive threats that underline cautionary urgency to so many of his child interactions. Cristin Milioti, fresh off of her Emmy-nominated turn as Sofia Falcone, in HBO’s The Penguin, is also breathlessly fantastic, playing Grace with a simmering undercurrent of devastating distress so palpably resonant without the need for much insightful dialogue contextualizing her introspective inferno of anxieties. Milioti’s big and bulging eyes unknowingly betray the surface level stability that she attempts to project to her unknowing family, eventually succumbing to much of the monumental magnitude of the terrifyingly isolated situation without intrusively undermining the film’s comedic dependability. Even the child trio of Delaney Quinn, Tristan Borders, and especially Madison Skyy Polan do a remarkable job of contextualizing the fright of such an inescapably helpless situation, in between moments of anxiously eager delivery while maintaining the show’s encompassing, and between the merited work of everyone previously mentioned and some big name cameos lending their likenesses and vocals to some strangely synthetic characters, there isn’t a single glaring stand-out weakness among the bunch, allowing the immersion of the experience to transpire much more effectively as a result of everyone realizing the same distinct vision.

NEGATIVES

As previously conveyed, not everything in the depths of the screenplay is seamlessly smoothed out to the understanding of the audience, specifically some of the established world-building rules from within the program world, which feel like they unnecessarily complicated the conflict resolutions from either side. Such an example pertains to Buddy’s desire to hug and sing with these child characters, in order to restore everything back to the show’s peacefully tranquil settings, however even when he does this a time or two during the third act, there’s no shift back to the factory settings of his intentional objective, instead prolonging the extent of the conflict by convoluting everything that we came to coherently interpret about the rules to that point. It’s not the only time when the logic does line up to eye level, but definitely the worst of those offenses, as I feel like it gives Buddy an overwhelming advantage over child protagonists, but instead opts out of using the plot device until the storytelling absolutely requires it. In addition to some of the world-building not always lining up, some of the editing during the movie’s second half left slightly more to be desired in the vested interests of some particular character arcs, such as Milioti’s Grace, who goes mostly absent during the most urgently intense moments for the children. Instead of jugging the respective arcs responsibly, it instead utilizes an agonizingly prolonged scene involving some previous cast-members who have spent too much time eluding Buddy inside of the TV world, and while I understand the scene’s creative intention, it ultimately goes nowhere fascinating in the delivery of its destination, instead leaving me clamoring for some semblance of follow-up focus on Grace, who basically remains on autopilot until she’s eventually inserted directly in the middle of the movie’s climax.

OVERALL
Buddy is an ambitiously imaginative and creatively unnerving rendering of televised child programming at its most uncomfortably artificial, featuring a seamless sponging of atmospheric ingredients so richly realized with familiarity that it will appeal most to those who have been unfortunately subjected to such moral meandering. With a collective ensemble committing endlessly to the fantastical extent of its gonzo gimmick, as well as a rich balance of humor and horror, the film represents a daring not-for-everyone directorial debut for Casper Kelly, whose delirious absurdity for uncovered nostalgia weaponizes the escapist factor of our own expressive imagination, providing bloody brutal fits of frenzied fun that represents absurdist horror at its most inventive

My Grade: 8.1 or B+