We’ve had a rash of “what if kid’s movie but gorey” rip offs lately. Things hit the public domain and for whatever reason the first thing people decide to churn out is Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or Pinocchio Unstrung. Even Steamboat Willy joined the blood drenched fun with The Mouse Trap. Most (all) of these attempts add little to the zeitgeist than the concept contained in their title, and that’s what many thought we would get when Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly rolled out his Barney the Dinosaur influenced horror film Buddy. A story that centers on a fuzzy orange unicorn that exists in a television program with an incredibly similar cadence to the purple dinosaur’s plot beats. If one can call the beats of Barney & Friends plot, that is.

There was always something a little eerie about Barney, and about children’s television in general. The pregnant pauses when Dora asks the audience to participate, the wide eyed faraway look that exists inside of Cocomelon. Anyone that’s spent a second on Kid’s YouTube can attest that the never ending carousel of content is unfathomably more chilling than anything Fright Master Wes Craven could ever have dreamed up. So Buddy borrows from that already unsettling timbre of kid’s TV, and doubles down by making him a tyrannical dictator of the dimension he presides over. When a kid gets out of line, or the friendly mailman asks too many questions, Buddy dispatches them and replaces them without a second thought.

Horror often gives little attempt at anything other than broad strokes, both in performance and moral. Kegan Michael Key voices Buddy and gives the unicorn a fittingly Barney cadence. We also get Patton Oswalt voicing Strappy, a sentient backpack that is witness to many of Buddy’s crimes. There’s plenty of humor in Buddy, and the comedians and actors that bring it front and center are great at mixing the comedy and the brutality. The real issue with Buddy is that of tone. The film can’t quite decide if it wants our heroes to conquer all, or to be beaten by the onslaught of this television unicorn. It’s an issue that’s prevalent throughout, sometimes feeling like a Spielbergian sci fi family movie, and at other times like the meanest, nastiest extremist horror film you can think of. The ending in particular feels especially mixed, a halfway point between victory and defeat. Nobody likes a tie game, and leaning one way or another as the credits rolled would have helped the story structure.

Buddy does a number of things right in terms of pacing though, biding time before the gore and guts really start flowing out of TV. There is perhaps a problem with the concept of a repeatable intro song that overstays its welcome, and the plodding nature of kid’s television isn’t exactly what one could call cinematic. But without giving too much away, Buddy eventually finds a way out of this feedback loop and starts building towards some the themes of the film. One of the role children’s entertainment plays in our lives, and how much we should rely on it.

There is something to be said for the ways in which we rely on screens to babysit for us. Kelly seems to be grappling not just with the unsettling nature of the content, but the role that it plays in parent’s lives in the same way Toy Story 5 attempted to in regards to tablets. These themes feel a little tacked on by the time we get to them, but they’re handled with clearer messaging than some. Casper seems to have a firmer take than Andrew Stanton did with TS5 in that there is justice wrought unto Buddy the Unicorn for his sins, and more direct consequences for characters that became trapped inside Buddy’s television program. The failure to launch nature of someone trapped within a TV program literally is easily transcribed to someone in a more figurative situation.

If nothing else Buddy watches like a solid episode of The Twilight Zone. At a brisk ninety five minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it also doesn’t feel particularly stretched either. Something that “would be a solid episode of The Twilight Zone” type films often struggle with. It’s smarter than expected, has lots of quality humor, and deeply upsetting moments. Everything modern horror has come to embrace. Also there are puppets! I love puppets!

3.5/5