Death to Smoochy was always seen as the bar for any movie that wanted to darkly take aim at kids TV shows. Even with talk of Daniel Kaluuya trying to make a Barney movie, I really didn’t think anyone could come up with a clever enough idea to really surpass Danny DeVito’s satire. Casper Kelley took all my concerns, and shoved them down my throat, choking me to death with them while singing a song about being brave for the boys and girls at home. What Buddy pulls off here is darn near a miracle. A deranged, psychotic miracle.
Buddy (Keegan Michael Key) is a Barney like star of a 1999 kids TV show, It’s Buddy! We get 10 minutes of the show as Buddy teaches kids standard child life lessons like sharing and friendship. 3 of the kids Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Oliver (Tristan Borders), Wade (Caleb Williams), are stoked to dance and learn from our friendly neighborhood Unicorn. But one kid, Josh (Luke Speakman), would prefer to read his book and sit on the swings by himself. But since that’s not part of Buddy’s ideal program, Josh has to learn the lessons…likely the hard way.
Casper Kelly doesn’t make things easy on himself. Buddy is DARK, and goes for really bold choices with its storytelling shock and awe campaign. Fortunately, he’s thought this through, walking on a tightrope on a knife’s edge. The surreality of the TV show format keeps the audience one layer removed from reality, meaning Kelly has some creative license to try crazy sh*t on there, and play it off like a cruel, but very funny joke. Those Barney like shows only are supposed to be thirty minutes at most. So what Kelly does around that is widen the net of his tale, little by little. At a first act breaking point, we flash to Grace (Cristin Milioti), who’s raising a family of 4, but feels like her normal looking world also doesn’t quite work. Kelly uses this segment as a natural come down to build everything back up. He intercuts back with Buddy’s TV show and the kids, showing the depths of that circle of hell they’ve found themselves in, and slowly weaving Grace’s plight into the proceedings. The third act like the 2nd reveals a little more of what’s going on, but also raises even more questions, pushing the story forward wondering what lunacy might be waiting for us around the corner we haven’t already experienced. It’s an upside down world, where many puppets are horrifyingly malevolent and things like a mailbox or a backpack could cause a person to cry the saddest of tears.
But it always comes back to Buddy. Casper Kelly and Keegan Michael Key completely nail all the uneasiness those puppet TV show characters can be in our nightmares. Key twists that aw shucksy sing song speech of Buddy into more and more ominous overt threats when the show doesn’t go Buddy’s way, eventually turning on the evil and scaring the hell out of us at peak hellscape. Kelly helps Key out with some of the directorial choices for what he makes buddy do. Buddy’s brutality is played for gasps but leads to many funny bits, like his destruction of the set when he doesn’t get his hug. But there’s also deeper, more terrifying depths to his movements, especially as Grace finds herself on It’s Buddy! Don’t worry, there’s no pedophilia with the kids, but Casper Kelly’s movie makes me not rule that out for the demented buddy, a testament to how frighteningly wickedly menacing this whole experience was.
I’m getting real scared. I have a 2 year old niece who I’m gonna have to babysit soon. She’s gonna watch one of these shows for sure. And when that happens, I’m gonna shiver thinking about Buddy I know it. Ms. Rachel? more like missed Rachel to play with no TV instead, sweet niece. *shivers*.