The quirky, inventive Buddy is *mostly* excellent stuff
Buddy is such an excellent horror film because its subtextual qualities are practically endless. You can read the film any number of ways and they all work. Is it a magical realism allegory for surviving an abusive stepfather? A not so subtle metaphor for consumer marketing directed towards children? A parable about growing up in a cultish religion? They can all be applied to Buddy, but even if you want to interpret it as just a movie about Barney the Dinosaur going psycho, you’ll still have a hell of a time watching it.
Buddy isn’t exactly a “new” idea. Indeed, we had a pretty great movie about a vengeance-seeking children’s TV host, Mr. Crocket, just a few years ago. What Buddy does differently, though, is tell its story mostly through the brilliant conceit of a string of diagetic TV episodes fused together … with the overarching story getting darker and darker as the movie chugs along.
You might be wondering how dark this movie gets. Well, it’s not exactly Nekromantik or A Serbian Film, but it nonetheless delves into some unnerving territory. It’a a movie about children in peril and as such, there’s going to be some obvious moments of unease and distress. It’s not a Terrifier 3 style bloodbath, but in a lot of ways it’s a much more discomforting and disturbing film without all of the bloodshed and exploded kindergartner guts.
The material is quite appropriate considering director Casper Kelly got his start writing cartoons like CatDog and Stroker and Hoop. There’s a very obvious Adult Swim vibe to the movie, but thankfully it never becomes too tongue in cheek or absurdly comedic for its own good. Once the movie takes that hard turn into proper horror, it never really back pedals or lets up the tension. It doesn’t take long for you to sense something is amiss, and once the gonzo set pieces begin, it’s just full tilt mayhem until the end credits.
You might think the person who wrote the Cheddar Goblin sequence in Mandy would go light and frothy material, but that’s not the case at all. Kelly, who directed the “Fun Size” sequence in the last V/H/S installment, keeps it fairly serious in Buddy, although I suppose there’s only so much callous horror you can get out of a guy wearing a goofy unicorn costume. It takes a while for the titular character to truly feel menacing, but when Buddy goes homicidal he REALLY paints the set red.
So much of the movie is driven by its throwback aesthetics (down to the grainy imagery of the film itself) and you might be worried that it tries to coast on its visual appeal alone. Thankfully, there’s more substance than Buddy than you might expect. The performances from the child cast are actually really good and the ensemble cast … despite being trapped in gaudy, outlandish costumes … do a commendable job carrying their parts of the story, too. The allusions to a certain prehistoric PBS spokes-dinosaur are all but unavoidable, but the movie does quite a few callbacks and nods to stuff like Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Shining Time Station, too. It’s sort of a love-in to all of latchkey kid staples of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s; it’s obviously the work of someone who knows that particular entertainment industry silo a little too well.
It’s a weird movie in the sense that most of its biggest names — Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt, etc. — only show up in the form of voice acting roles. Which isn’t deleterious to the film at all … especially when CLINT HOWARD shows up out of the blue for seemingly no apparent reason at all. Amazingly, the best all around performance in the entire film belongs to Delaney Quinn, who does a remarkable job playing the actress pursued by Buddy — that is, until she turns the tables on him. It’s a hell of a performance and I get the feeling we’re going to be hearing way more about her in the years ahead.
I’d contend that about 80 percent of Buddy is absolutely fantastic. Then, we have this 15-minute-long snag in the middle of the movie that’s one of the most inexplicably pointless and momentum derailing plot twists I’ve seen in any movie this year. For whatever reason, we break away from the TV show within a movie gimmick around the halfway point of the picture for a bizarre and needless sequence where Cristin Milioti dials up an alleged paranormal investigator while Topher Grace lifelessly goes through the motions in the background. I understand the narrative reason why the movie goes through such an identity crisis at this particular juncture in the story, but man, does it take a tremendous amount of steam out of the film — which, up to this point, was a roaring success.
The movie does rebound once it goes back to its analog roots and the third act is very satisfying (for a lot of different reasons.) It’s funny, it’s creepy, it’s riveting and it makes you feel way more grossed out about puppet dismemberments than you ever thought a movie could in a million years. It’s not a complete and constant success as a movie, but it is for the most part. Sorry, Topher — not unlike Spider-Man 3, whenever you’re onscreen the movie just slows to a nigh-unwatchable standstill.
It’s a film that sounds like a pretty hokey gimmick, but in execution it’s an unexpected success in most regards. We all figured it would work as a horror comedy, or some sort of meta-genre commentary, but I didn’t think it would excel as a pure, non-comedic horror film this well. It’s a film that’s cutting much closer to the first two Child’s Play movies than it is the Five Nights At Freddy’s movies and I think we can already smell the franchise potential brewing.
Buddy is the best kind of sleeper horror hit. You go in with iffy expectations and the flick, by and large, keeps surprising you at every turn. It may not be as good as something like Buffet Infinity or Camp Miasma or Is God Is, but I have a hard time imagining this film not making my eventual top ten horror movies of ‘26 list. It’s a rollicking, roaring good time … and that aforementioned 15-minute doldrum gives you plenty of time to hit the bathroom or restock on popcorn and Pepsi before the movie gets awesome again.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Any of the Chucky movies, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, other people having worse childhoods than you did
DIRECTOR: Casper Kelly
WRITER(s): Casper Kelly, Jamie King
STARRING: Keegan-Michael Key, Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon, Delaney Quinn
STUDIO: BoulderLight Pictures, Low Spark Films
DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions, Saban Films
RUNTIME: 96 minutes
LANGUAGE: English
RELEASE DATE: August 28, 2026