I’ve always loved going to screenings at film festivals. Most of the people in the audience are in great moods and ready to be entertained, no matter what the film is. That was definitely the case with Buddy, which had an early-morning screening at Comic-Con.
Buddy is a Barney-like unicorn who entertains kids while teaching them important life lessons. He’s funny, cuddly and seemingly loved by everyone. But Buddy isn’t nearly as innocent as he appears.
It turns out he’s a giant, multicolored psychopath who pulls his real-life victims from their living rooms and traps them inside his make-believe 1990s television world.
The film opens with a couple of quick episodes of the actual show, It’s Buddy!, complete with colorful sets, big smiles and an insanely catchy theme song that I’m still singing today. Everything starts off rather peachy, with Wade (Caleb Williams), Oliver (Tristan Borders) and Freddy (Delaney Quinn) singing, playing and dancing alongside their bestie Buddy, voiced with just the right amount of cheerful insanity by Keegan-Michael Key.
But by the end of the second episode, Freddy begins to suspect that Buddy isn’t everything he’s made himself out to be. The kids don’t remember their lives before the show, and they’ve been taught to follow Buddy’s directions without question. When Freddy starts pushing back and asking questions, cracks begin to form in their seemingly perfect world.
We then move into the real world, where Grace (Cristin Milioti), her husband Ben (Topher Grace) and their family are eating dinner. Even with all the fun family banter, something seems a bit off, especially when Grace glances over at an empty chair at the table. Soon, she lets out a long, desperate scream. Yup, there’s definitely something not quite right.
Grace is haunted by the feeling that something or someone one is missing from her life, but she can’t understand why. Her search for answers eventually leads her toward the long-forgotten children’s show Buddy has created.
Back inside the show, the children witness some truly horrific things before managing to escape their prison set… or house, depending on how you look at it, and run into the fake woods beyond it. But they don’t make it out without casualties.
The film moves back and forth between the two worlds until reality and the TV show finally begin to collide.
The kids in the film are great. Wade is the brave one, Oliver is the nerdy one and Freddy is smart, fearless and everything in between. We experience most of the film through her, and Quinn is terrific in the role. She has an incredibly expressive face and can go from happy to terrified in the blink of an eye.
Milioti, who can seemingly play anything thrown her way, is great as well. Grace spends much of the movie trying to understand memories and emotions she can’t quite put together, and Milioti makes every confusing piece of that journey feel real.
For a movie about a homicidal unicorn, Buddy also has some surprisingly emotional moments between Milioti and Quinn. Credit goes to director Casper Kelly, who wrote the film with Jamie King, for making room for those scenes. Without them, the movie could have easily become nothing more than a funny and violent takedown of children’s television. Instead, there’s an actual story about loss and family.
There are also some incredibly funny moments, thanks to Patton Oswalt’s Strappy the backpack, along with George (Clint Howard) and Willie, a puppet voiced by Michael Shannon. They’re strange, hilarious and more than a little disturbing, which is a pretty good description of the entire movie.
Buddy is funny, creepy, violent and much more heartfelt than I expected it to be. It takes something comforting and familiar from childhood and twists it into complete nightmare fuel but also gives us characters worth caring about. Watching it with a packed Comic-Con crowd made the experience even better. Everyone laughed, jumped and reacted together, which is exactly why I love festival screenings in the first place. And yes, days later, that ridiculously catchy theme song is still stuck in my head.
