Buddy (2026)

Buddy says the creepy part about Barney out loud.

The guy behind it is Casper Kelly, who made Too Many Cooks. I’m an avid fan of that short and of all the bizarre nightmare stuff Adult Swim put out around it, so this was right up my alley, man. I was very excited for it.

Buddy is a singing orange unicorn (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) who hosts a 1990s kids’ show, and the best thing the movie does is pull out the inherent creepiness of Barney: the cult-like devotion to one central figure that everyone adores and lavishes praise on constantly. The kids, the puppets and the talking mailbox all live to make Buddy happy. When a boy named Josh won’t join the dance party, he vanishes, and Buddy tells everyone he’s gone to Diamond City. When Freddy, one of the other kids, finds Josh’s bloody book in the trash, she takes it to Nurse Nancy, and Buddy kills Nancy for it.

It’s more creepy than scary, which I think is fine. It’s a low-budget movie, about $3 million, and I appreciated the constraints and the weirdness of the whole plot. It did end up looking pretty cheap to me.

I wish it was slightly more surreal. Is that weird to say? I wanted it to go a little further, and I get that the budget probably couldn’t. We get a peek behind the curtain of this world, and I wanted more of it.

Too Many Cooks got all the way to full nightmare in 11 minutes. Buddy has 96 and stops short of it.

Stray thoughts:

Patton Oswalt crushed it as Strappy, the show’s backpack.

I love seeing Topher Grace pop up as Ben, Cristin Milioti’s husband. Honestly, he popped pretty hard for me. He’s a big star, I love all the weirdo stuff he’s done since That ’70s Show, and I think he’s kind of an underrated actor right now.

The child actors in Buddy were fine.

Also on Letterboxd