SERGEY ZHURAVSKY IN THE CREATURE SUIT VOICED BY KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY IN BUDDY
The banality of evil
For a sensitive person all those bland afternoon TV shows for children surely must have seemed evil anyway: it's just a short step into a world where the puffy, good-natured critter with a tiny unicorn called "Buddy" is malevolent. It's just a question whether first-time director Casper Killy gets a maximum of creepiness out of his theme. I'm wondering, is this movie creepy and tasteless enough to get onto John Waters' annual best list? I don't know about that. But Kelly does tweak his way into a world of cleverly disguised horror.
This is because he does a good job of the authentic physical texture of standard-definition 90s television, 4x3 aspect ratio shifts, and practical puppet body horror. We physically enter into that world of the afternoon TV kids show, with the giant wooly puppet characters, actor inside, and the quartet of child actors, trained seals who, when they begin to provoke Buddy by not performing as he wants them to, start feeling the terror of his wrath when one of their number disappears and they suspect a dire cause. Repeatedly coming to closing credits for the "show" is one of the ways Kelly makes us feel trapped in a horrible, endless loop.
The titular Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a person-in-a suit character like Big Bird who presides - ostensibly - over a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. Oh, it's all there, in all its tedious coziness. Buddy is the host of a cheesy educational show called "It's Buddy!" We never see the human inside the unicorn suit and we shouldn't, the better to suspect that there really is no human inside there, ever.
This is a wide-swing mascot horror tale blending shows like Barney & Friends, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, and Kelly's own viral "Adult Swim" breakout Too Many Cooks. The latter may have been grimmer, but in interviews Kelly has shown that he sees that he's come to a moment when the surreal genre experiments he's been playing with have started to align with mainstream tastes. A lot of the popular movies these days, good and bad, seem to be, one way or another, horror movies. Among the trailers I watched before this very film, amid the B-movie Saban schlock, a new masterpiece by the horror auteur Robert Eggers was announced: Werewolf, coming Christmas Day from Focus Features.
But in a Los Angeles Times interview Kelly has referred to a scene between a married couple in Buddy (played by Topher Grace and Cristin Milioti) and said he might like to do stuff like that in future, in the manner of Mike Leigh. Maybe that might come out creepy enough to get on John Waters' best list.
Buddy, 96 mins., premiered Jan. 22, 2026 at Sundance, also snowing at SXSW, Overlook (New Orleans), Cleveland, Scary Movies (Lincoln Center). The film came to US theaters Aug. 28, 2026. Metacritic rating: 67%.
DELANEY QUINN AS FREDDY IN BUDDY