Buddy Film Review: Kids’ Show Turns Nasty

Buddy gleefully and wholly commits to slashing apart preschool programming with a hilarious, strange, razor-sharp horror comedy.

However, when these kids start deviating from the affable, sugary sweet script, Buddy begins to unravel and reveal his true nature as their psychotic captor, from whom the kids must now escape. Meanwhile, a married mother (Christina Milioti, of Palm Springs) is haunted by the sense that something from her past is missing, which causes her to get sucked into Buddy’s world as well. What ensues is the most horrific thing to ever hit preschool programming since the creation of Caillou. 

I was pretty confident that the early portion of the film would work, and it didn’t disappoint. Buddy captures everything about this genre of 90s kids’ entertainment so sharply that it could genuinely fool someone going in completely blind that it’s real. (And apparently, that’s been happening, proving that the true enemy is not doing basic research.) The brightly colored production design consists of real sets, costumes, and even puppets for inanimate objects brought to life in the vein of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. 

The “makeup” for the increasingly mangled mascot costumes looks juicier than the gore effects on real people in some movies. Even the bouncy sets feel more claustrophobic as it becomes clear how much of a trap they are. There’s detail all over the place, which adds a lot to the humor even before the situation goes off the rails.

Seemingly innocent dialogue and the slightest slip of a child’s smile get a nervous laugh, and the brief moments where the veil is broken through frantic attempts to keep things on the downlow or someone’s inability to hide pent-up fear are hysterical. Buddy introduces kids to the joys of cleaning but warns them to not consume the detergents. I don’t know what’s worse: the idea of him poisoning children, or him convincing them that cleaning is actually fun.

Writer/director Casper Kelly has history in Adult Swim, maybe most famously with the short film Too Many Cooks, and you can see those sensibilities slathered all over the screen. All the overly artificial, sugarcoated, utopian childishness of shows like this is very unnatural and forced to many an adult when done poorly. It fails to represent the more selfish, unfiltered nature of most young children, and it’s hilarious to see an entity like Buddy hostilely push against any kid who acts in opposition to such a vision.

My initial concerns were that, once the kids are on the run and the “plot” kicks in, Buddy would lose steam and become a more standard horror chase movie. But while it can’t quite match the highs of the first half hour, this film keeps the weirdness and satire coming in a somewhat different way. The wilderness still has a plastic look to it, which doubles as setup for an incredibly mean moment of something not being what the kids think it is.

Buddy very cleverly spotlights how, because these kids have never known life beyond their “show,” they don’t have the total functionality or knowledge that other kids even their age would have. So, they discover the fun of swearing after clearly never being allowed to do it. Since Buddy episodes begin and end in the middle of the day, they’re taken aback by their first time ever seeing a night sky. (Alaskans just call that the end of summer.) 

The kids also don’t talk quite right, keeping some of the inflections the show had drilled into them. They even retain some of the actual positive lessons they took from Buddy, showing that the film still sees at least some value in kids’ programming while literally bashing it to a bloody pulp. None of this would work without the excellent performances from the kid actors, mainly Delaney Quinn, Tristan Broders, and Madison Polan. They need to be constantly terrified and on their guard, in addition to balancing all the other nuances these roles demand. 

On the flip side, I genuinely didn’t recognize Keegan-Michael Key as the voice of Buddy, but he’s at his comedic peak while also being at his scariest since drowning someone over chocolate in Wonka. Cristin Milioti gets her own time to shine as we take a detour to show her life in the real world. Though you can figure out her connection to the main plot pretty quickly, her scenes lean much more into psychological, trauma-driven horror with enough misery and uncertainty to stand entirely on their own, let alone as a contrast to the rest of the film’s more satirical horror. 

Milioti’s performance is crucial to making the biggest emotional beats work, even with relatively little time devoted to them. Buddy flies by at a mere 96 minutes, to a point where part of me believes a major throughline is rushed or underdeveloped. But the more I think about what specific characters have experienced and, more importantly, have not experienced, the more it makes sense to keep their connection at arm’s length from the viewer. It puts us in everyone’s shoes and makes the payoff feel more surreal and bittersweet.

Which leaves me with pretty much nothing major to complain about with Buddy. I figured I’d at least moderately enjoy it, but it is lowkey one of the best horror films of the year. Although to give a potentially valuable anecdote, I was in a theater with about 20 other people and the only one laughing 90% of the time. Which says to me either I got stuck with a bunch of sourpusses, or – far more likely – you need to have a dark, twisted sense of humor to be on this movie’s wavelength.

If the premise sounds funny and even the slightest bit scary to you, though, it’s hard to imagine you not getting the movie you hoped for. It may get a bit stranger and more off-putting than you were already expecting, to be fair. But if you’re willingly paying money to see a killer unicorn with the exact same color palette as Donald Trump, that extra strangeness is probably a bonus for you.

Buddy will be released in US theaters on August 28, 2026. A digital release hasn’t been announced yet, but it’ll probably be around October 2026.