Plot
The Fake Kids Show Is Brilliantly Wrong
Buddy gets the most important part right almost immediately - the fake children's show actually feels like a real children's show, rather than something a horror movie put together five minutes before filming started, where It's Buddy! looks like it could have been recorded off television in 1997, with oversized costumes, bright sets, talking objects, painfully cheerful songs and that fuzzy 4:3 picture that makes the whole thing look like a forgotten VHS tape.
I especially liked how much effort went into making the show feel like it had its own history, because little things such as Strappy the backpack and Mr. Mailbox make it feel like there was an entire ridiculous world behind what we're seeing, which gives the horror something somewhat believable to mess up - if It's Buddy! looked too polished or too obviously fake, the joke would get old pretty quickly.
Buddy himself is also ridiculous, obviously, because he is a giant orange unicorn with blonde hair, with Sergey Zhuravsky performing inside the costume while Keegan-Michael Key provides the voice, and Key wisely doesn't try to make him sound like a traditional horror villain either, he keeps that relentlessly cheerful children's-show voice while Buddy becomes increasingly unpleasant.
I did laugh at him more than I expected to as well, but there is also something genuinely uncomfortable about the character as well, who seems to believe everyone should be happy, everyone should participate and everyone should love what he is doing - Delaney Quinn is also very good as Freddy, and the younger cast deserves a lot of credit here as well.
The main problem though is that Buddy can't maintain that same spark throughout the whole 95 minutes - the middle becomes more conventional, where the movie starts explaining things that were more interesting when they were left alone, and you end up wishing Kelly would stop worrying about making every strange idea completely understandable.
The Weirdness Is What Saves It
Casper Kelly was probably the perfect person to make something like this - the guy behind Too Many Cooks and Adult Swim Yule Log, and he also doesn't need to keep reminding us that the children's show is ridiculous, because the bright costumes, cheerful songs and giant orange unicorn already do that job - the fun comes from watching something that should be completely harmless slowly become something you really don't want to be around.
Cristin Milioti helps when the movie moves further away from the children's show, bringing some much-needed personality to the adult side of things, while Topher Grace, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt add to the increasingly strange collection of people and characters surrounding Buddy - Oswalt's voice work as Strappy is particularly funny because, somehow, a talking backpack becomes one of the more memorable parts of a movie about an orange unicorn, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how odd this film is.
I did wish the horror had gone further, though - there are bloody moments and some nasty ideas, but the setup gives Kelly so many opportunities to make children's entertainment genuinely disturbing that I was occasionally left wanting more, and it isn't really about needing more gore, either, because the contrast between the cheerful world and what happens inside it is already unsettling - I just think the movie sometimes has a much nastier idea sitting right there and then decides to play it safe.
Still, I enjoyed Buddy, and I'd much rather watch an imperfect movie with an enormous orange unicorn and some genuinely strange ideas than another polished horror movie that feels like it was assembled from the same ten pieces as everything else.
Final Thoughts
Buddy has some issues, but it is at least memorable, and Casper Kelly clearly knows how to turn something familiar into something deeply odd, and I enjoyed it more than I was anticipating.