Buddy is the latest fever dream from writer/director Casper Kelly (co-written by Jamie King), the creator of the viral Too Many Cooks short and the delightfully unhinged Adult Swim Yule Log movies. He takes the premise of a Barney-type ‘90s kids show and turns into an equal parts horror comedy. If you’re into any of his previous work, this will work on you. But a few factors remain: the baggage you bring to it, and if it warrants the run time.
The film is very similar to Too Many Cooks in that it takes a stereotypical ‘90s TV show and immediately adds a menacing quality to it. In Too Many Cooks, the endless title sequence starts off amusing but quickly becomes a banal hellscape that switches genres and features a machete-wielding killer. Everyone seems trapped inside this false feel-good scenario. And so too are the characters in Buddy.
Buddy is a kind of hybrid Barney and Pee-wee’s Playhouse with anthropomorphic animals, objects, and furniture coupled with human characters like children, a nurse, and a mailman. It seems normal and awful enough at first with songs and bland lessons. But things take a dark turn quickly when one of the children just wants to be left alone.
I’ll leave it at that, as you can guess that things get darker and darker from there. At first glance, this might seem a bit one-note and deserving of just another short film instead of a feature. While I did find it a bit too long (I just think films like this should keep things under ninety minutes while this clocks in at ninety-five [like I said, just a bit too long]), it keeps changing things up and adding such unexpected elements that it felt compelling throughout.
The dark humor and left-field moments are the main draw here, with some amazing child acting and voice-work. Patton Oswalt was born to voice a backpack, Keegan-Michael Key is doing his best evil Barney impression, and Michael Shannon is perfect as a cowboy puppet. Little moments like the other characters reacting to shocking violence had me laughing throughout. But I was expecting that from the premise.
What surprised me about Barney is how truly unsettling it was. This is where the personal baggage comes into play. Becoming a parent has turned me into a basic bitch when it comes to certain elements in movies, and while I’ve tried to get over that (manipulating parents for emotional effect is practically a sub-genre thanks to Pixar), every now and then it gets to me. Seeing children near the age of my own in peril is certainly disturbing. This might sound weird, but it’s not the violence happening to them, it’s the abject fear they are in for large portions of the film.
In most horror films, the characters are so underdeveloped that I don’t care what happens to them and often we’re meant to root for their demise. With Buddy, however, I just wanted to see these kids get to safety. A lot of this has to do with the great performances of the children both as fake happy participants of the show and as frightened prisoners. Delaney Quinn (who voiced the child in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) is the stand-out, but there isn’t a weak performance here.
Cristin Milioti rounds out the cast, and my anxiety, as Grace, a mother of one of the children. The film, thankfully, doesn’t dwell on her feeling like something is missing in the real world and gets her to the Buddy world quickly enough. Her scenes recognizing her daughter and fighting to protect her are the most emotionally charged moments for me. That aspect of the film stuck with me in a film I expected to be an overlong gimmick.
There’s obviously a heavy dose of satire in Buddy, primarily focusing on the odd dynamic of Barney in the ‘90s. Why did this purple dinosaur need these children to love him? Why was he even around these kids? But the satire goes beyond the obvious and gets more into losing children to any kind of media. It’s not preachy or anything, but it’s easy to see a parallel with modern screen time. It doesn’t seem like the film is condemning all technology or anything. It’s more of a message of what happens when children are encouraged to develop emotional ties to the things and/or people they are watching.
Once again, this depends on your own baggage. For me, I constantly worry about my children and how much screen time we allow them. For sure, it’s too much, and I feel guilty about it, and this film brought that to mind. Thankfully, I’ve never dealt with any of my children claiming to love Mickey Mouse or anything like that. Sure, they’ve had their favorite shows and now YouTubers, but they’ve never claimed to love any of them, and I don’t feel like I’m losing them to some digital hellscape that I will one day need to rescue them from. Buddy brings to mind that modern parenting battle, though, without making it the “message” or any other such nonsense.
Buddy may have been more disturbing than I expected, but it was also entertaining throughout. The gore, the jokes, the voicework, the perfectly nailed aesthetic of the period, it all makes for a movie worthy of feature length. Just beware, because for some viewers it might invoke some Barney-like terror inside you between laughs.
I’m not one to usually wish for a prequel or short exploring the history of a character in a show or movie, but I would love to see the full story of Clint Howard and Michael Shannon, love scenes and all.
I get that Buddy had to fully change into a bigger menace at some point, but I wasn’t crazy about the demonic unicorn form. Though I appreciate that it was foreshadowed by a videogame poster on the wall of Milioti’s bedroom after she disappeared and it became single-dad Topher Grace’s room.
Speaking of Milioti, she wears a football jersey t-shirt to bed in one of her scenes that has Miami Dolphins colors and the number five. I can’t find any evidence to back this up, but this has to be a reference to Ray Finkle from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the villain of that film who wore number five for the Dolphins. I would love to eventually get some kind of confirmation of this. Hopefully there’s an interview or commentary track in the future that will explain the wardrobe choice.