With Casper Kelly’s feature-length horror debut Buddy, what you see is pretty much exactly what you get. The layers are peeled back on a Barney or Mickey Mouse-esque children’s television series to reveal an origin that’s considerably more sinister and bloody, as Buddy, a bright orange unicorn who loves to dance and play around his playhouse with a cast of endlessly delighted children, slowly reveals himself to be something much more horrifying. The opening 30-ish minutes are almost a perfect recreation of one of those artificial daytime kids shows, all positive reinforcement, colorful sets, goofy hijinks, and the kind of aggressively cheerful energy that makes you immediately wonder when everything is going to go horribly wrong.
That breaking point comes when one of the kids just doesn’t seem particularly interested in dancing. Buddy does not take unenthusiasm lightly, and the fracturing of the idyllic world he’s so desperately trying to maintain turns him into a psychotic, rampaging mascot monster capable of some of the gnarliest kills you’ll see in a horror movie this year. From there, Buddy is essentially a collision between saccharine children’s television and mean-spirited splatter horror, and it’s at its best when it simply lets those two things crash into one another as violently as possible.
Kelly comes from the V/H/S anthology machine, and you can feel that DNA all over this. His V/H/S/Halloween segment “Fun Size” took something as innocuous as candy and warped it into a nightmare, while Buddy does essentially the same thing with early-morning kids television. There’s a particular kind of sicko horror movie that gets its entire reason for existing from taking something deeply embedded in childhood nostalgia and making it as grotesque as possible, and Kelly clearly knows exactly how to push those buttons. The kills are nasty, the humor is intentionally cruel, and there’s a slapstick quality to the violence that should play extremely well with the right horror crowd.
The more conventional story revolves around Grace, a mother who’s skeptical about the origins of the show but can’t convince her husband that something is actually wrong. Cristin Milioti gives the movie’s most sincere performance, playing Grace’s concerns completely straight even when the circumstances around her become increasingly ridiculous. Topher Grace, meanwhile, plays the husband who’s so oblivious and unwilling to listen to her that you’re almost rooting for the lunatic children’s mascot to prove her right. Unfortunately for both of them, Grace eventually gets quite literally sucked into the show through her television in a surprisingly effective sequence with some genuinely good-looking effects, where she discovers her long-lost daughter Freddy and realizes that her worst suspicions about Buddy are true.
From there, the movie settles into the formula you’d expect: Buddy, voiced with exactly the right level of cartoonish menace by Keegan-Michael Key, picks the children off one by one in increasingly bloody fashion. There’s not much mystery about where this is headed once the central premise is established, but I’m not sure Buddy needs much more than that. This is a movie built around the juxtaposition of its two aesthetics, and the audience showing up for it is probably going to know exactly what they’re getting into.
Where I think the movie becomes a little more divisive is in how much it commits to the 90s children’s-show pastiche. The extended sequences that recreate the artificiality of those shows are impressively committed, but I didn’t find them quite as funny or effective as the more straightforward suburban nightmare that Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man pulled off earlier this month. The transitions between the television world, the “real” world, and the increasingly violent horror sequences can also feel a little jarring, and the movie doesn’t always find a particularly satisfying rhythm between its two modes. It’s a stylistic choice that will probably come down entirely to your mileage.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: Tony, Rose of Nevada, Don’t Say Good Luck
Still, I’m glad movies like this are getting made. I wrote recently about how much I enjoy seeing sicko horror movies like Ice Cream Man get theatrical releases (although limited and to say the film was not well received is an understatement), and Buddy falls squarely into that same category. This isn’t trying to be elevated horror or some deeply thematic meditation on childhood trauma. It’s a movie about an evil orange unicorn brutally murdering children, and it understands that there’s an audience that will find that sentence alone to be an adequate selling point.
I think the right crowd is going to have an absolute blast with Buddy, particularly if they find themselves in one of those raucous midnight screenings where the audience is just as willing to laugh at the gore as they are to recoil from it. The 90s kids-show angle didn’t work quite as well for me as the movie’s more straightforward horror, and I don’t think there’s enough underneath the concept to make this something I’ll be thinking about for very long. But Kelly clearly knows the exact kind of deranged audience he’s making this for, and Buddy delivers enough blood, absurdity, and mascot mayhem to satisfy them.
Score: 5/10
Buddy (2026)
- Cast: Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt, Clint Howard, Eric Bauza
- Director: Casper Kelly
- Genre: Comedy, Horror
- Runtime: 95 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: August 28, 2026
- Movies Like Buddy: Five Nights at Freddy’s, Death of a Unicorn, The Monkey
- Follow us on Letterboxd
