THE STORY – Dressed as a unicorn, a beloved children’s TV host reveals his true self as a dark and violent force of nature.
THE CAST – Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon, Topher Grace & Keegan-Michael Key
THE TEAM – Casper Kelly (Director/Writer) & Jamie King (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 96 Minutes
Casper Kelly may not be a household name, but anyone with a penchant for exploring the weirder depths of popular art will recognize his work. His best-known creations were produced for Cartoon Network, starting in 1999 with the technically for-kids parody of “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Scooby-Doo Project” (which, for the record, scared this critic as a child so badly). Later, in the 21st century, he moved to Adult Swim, CN’s adult-focused late-night programming. This led to his greatest and most well-known creation, “Too Many Cooks,” an on-the-surface gentle parody of cheesy ’80s and ’90s sitcom intros that slowly – and terrifyingly – morphs into something much more menacing. He followed this up with the feature-length surreal horror “Adult Swim Yule Log” and its sequel, and now he’s finally made the logical and long-delayed leap to theatrical filmmaking. Fans of his work (and horror lovers in general) will undoubtedly be perversely delighted by “Buddy,” an unsettling tonal collision that’s both hilariously disturbing and disturbingly hilarious.
“Buddy” finds Kelly working in a well-established, comfortable lane for the director, although that doesn’t mean it resembles anything typically found at the cinema. As he often does, Kelly starts his film in a benign, obnoxiously innocent place. Here, the setting is the colorful, patently artificial set of a children’s television show, specifically the kind that would be familiar to anyone who grew up in the ’90s. But instead of, say, a purple T-Rex or a bear who prefers a blue house to a cave, the star of this show is the titular Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key in a locked-in performance), an ostensibly friendly orange unicorn. Buddy’s clubhouse and backyard set is contained in a way that feels appropriately stage-like, with a safe, cozy, hermetic quality that eventually starts to feel like an enclosure for the children who hang out there.
Buddy isn’t the only fantastical creature, though. There are several anthropomorphized household objects, like a talking mailbox and couch, all brought to life with puppetry that would’ve made Paul Reubens proud. In fact, the faithful recreation of trademark elements of this era of children’s TV shows, including the off-puttingly huge Buddy costume, a shrunken aspect ratio, and abrupt music cues (songwriter Shawn Coleman and composer Michael Yezerski clearly did their research), is perhaps the film’s most impressive achievement. Kelly even includes the pauses that often followed dialogue in shows of this type, meant to give the young at-home audience space to respond to the characters on their television sets. But here, in the context of an adult-aimed film, these wordless moments take on an increasingly uncanny quality, almost like the expectant dread before a jump scare.
It doesn’t take long before things start to feel more than just subtextually off. Buddy’s devotion to the standard script and order of operations starts to feel maniacal. The children slowly begin to suspect that their idyllic playtime may not be the perfect hangout, leading the young Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan), and Oliver (Tristan Broders) to try and break free from the fenced-in haven. Eventually, the film itself also breaks away from its self-established patterns, making a huge leap to the real world. There, we meet Grace (Cristin Milioti), an ordinary woman who (much like Buddy’s small human friends) feels that something is increasingly off. Her husband Ben (Topher Grace) is no help, insisting that her fear that something in their lives is severely wrong is all in her head. But this doesn’t deter Grace from poking into the darkened shadows of her everyday existence, eventually leading to a collision between her life and the false realm ruled by Buddy.
As always, Milioti is fantastic. She plays Grace with a simmering undercurrent of distress, foreshadowing that something is deeply wrong even before her character knows it. Her big eyes unknowingly betray the stability that she tries to project to her family. As they often do in stories like this, Grace’s anxieties begin to overpower her façade of normality, and Milioti plays the horror at an expert level that sells her terror without undermining the film’s comedic side. To that point, the scene where she’s finally forced to face the threat of Buddy’s encroaching parallel universe for the first time is both hilarious (it’s a great sequence of physical comedy) and surprisingly disturbing in a way that so clearly appeals to the director.
This extremely deft ability of tonal control is undoubtedly Kelly’s greatest gift. He can fully switch from comedy to horror and back again (and sometimes, repeatedly back and forth) within one scene, or even one shot. As he’s shown in his past work, he has a unique ability to recreate pastiche elements of retro pop culture while identifying the parts that can easily be viewed as strange or frightening. There’s a fine line between comfort and creepiness in the typical elements of a children’s TV show, from otherworldly characters to simplistic dialogue. When observed for too long, these aspects can seem like they’re being used to hide something more sinister – a shared generational thought pattern that has led to popular creepypasta stories revolving around children’s media, including video games, movies, and yes, television programs. And although this approach is effective, “Buddy’s” feature-length runtime feels a bit too stretched for the concept. The irony and dark juxtaposition of horror techniques with the youth-focused perspective of Buddy’s TV show can only remain compelling for so long. Most notably, the journey that the trio of adventurous children embarks on becomes particularly obtuse and loses steam the further they wander from their familiar environment. But in its more successful moments, the dual comedic and horror intentions of “Buddy” undoubtedly work.
Much like his characters often do, Casper Kelly has moved from one world to another: television to theatrical film. And while “Buddy” isn’t as entirely effective as his more compact previous creations, it features enough of his trademark tricks and spooky-funny directorial flourishes to both satisfy his fans and welcome in new devotees. It’s uncanny, unsettling, and undeniably thrilling.
