Buddy is nuts but entertaining.

   Buddy is a fever dream throwback to 90s kids' shows such as Barney and the Teletubbies, with a dose of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and the recent horror sensation Backrooms thrown in for good measure. Is it satire, parody, comedy, or horror? The answer is a little bit of all of the above. Buddy is that rare enough picture these days: something not just an original take, but not something you’ve really seen before. It's a funny, disturbing, even occasionally scary trip into kid TV hell.

            If shows like Barney have a named genre, I am not sure what it is, only that Buddy, the TV show named after its main character, is that kind of show. Buddy sings, dances, teaches brief moral lessons to a regular group of kids in a cartoonish world in which the well, the mailbox, and the couch have eyes. The first 15-20 minutes of the film inhabit this world exclusively, playing out like a very bad Barney Meets Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Gradually, a dark underbelly of Buddy and his world starts to reveal itself – Buddy has something of a temper, it turns out, as he dispatches one of the kids for not taking his sage advice. The other kids on the show slowly discover that something is up and start to realize that Buddy is not exactly what he appears to be. Eventually, we pop over to the “real world” and get a peek into the lives of Grace and Ben (Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace) and their kids- a world in which, much like Buddy’s, something is not quite right, something that reveals itself gradually, only to eventually unite the two worlds in an unexpected way.

            Much like its title character, Buddy inhabits two worlds: on one hand, the film is patently absurd with more than one rather cringe-worthy scene (kids getting high on psychedelics and an old cowboy making out with a puppet come to mind), while at the same time being a rather disturbing horror film, for while the adults of the film don’t escape Buddy’s wrath once it's roused, the majority of his victims are kids. There’s also the creepy, not-quite-right day glow universe he inhabits, as well as the wilderness outside his house and the kids’ journey through it, which made me think of a version of Oz even creepier than the one in the original film. The movie, despite the fact that its monster is a fuzzy, bright orange unicorn, has a couple of jump scares and a couple of scenes that have you on the edge of your seat, as well as more than its share of “Ewwwwws …”

            There is even a tiny bit of very subtle social commentary mixed in, most notably, the power and influence media and television have over our children. This is a small part of the film, and viewers watching to the end hoping to get some kind of logical explanation will leave the theater wanting. That being said, grown-up fans of slasher pictures who grew up watching shows like Barney will likely enjoy this one, and since it seems to be a hit, we’ll likely see some of Buddy and his kind.