Buddy Review: Barney Finally Found Out We Hated Him

People my age missed the Barney craze by just enough.

While the youngins were happily singing “I love you” back and forth with the big purple bastard, the rest of us were standing off to the side hoping he would trip into a wood chipper.

Apparently, the people who made Buddy felt the same way.

Because Buddy feels like Barney finally found out exactly how much the rest of the world hated him, spent thirty years thinking about it and completely fucking snapped.

And I mean that as a compliment.

Buddy is deranged in the best possible way. It takes that aggressively happy world of children’s television—bright colors, talking animals, smiling hosts and lessons about friendship—and twists it just far enough that everything suddenly feels wrong.

Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy, an orange unicorn who can go from nauseatingly sweet children’s-show host to completely unhinged without ever feeling like two different characters. That switch is what makes him work.

I can absolutely see Buddy Halloween costumes everywhere, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re looking at another modern horror favorite in the making. Art the Clown became bigger than the movie that introduced him. Buddy has that kind of potential.

The world around him is just as insane.

There’s a definite Pee-wee’s Playhouse quality to the collection of puppets, talking objects and bizarre characters inhabiting Buddy’s world. Betty Bunny seems to have some idea that things aren’t exactly right, but she’s perfectly content to keep playing along.

There’s also a very Adult Swim gone horribly wrong feel to the whole thing, which makes perfect sense coming from Too Many Cooks director Casper Kelly. The movie keeps pushing familiar children’s television imagery further and further into the bizarre without ever losing control of itself.

Buddy is balancing horror, comedy, psychological weirdness, children’s-show parody and complete fucking nonsense all at once. Thankfully for the most part, it works. But underneath all that insanity is something much nastier.

The kids.

Horror movies have trained us to watch stupid teenagers walk into obvious death traps and think, “Well, that idiot’s dead.” Sometimes that’s why you bought the ticket. Nobody is asking for the Friday the 13th sequel where Jason tears through a senior home. Buddy changes the equation because these are children. You want them to make it.

Even the annoying ones.

That gives everything happening around them a cruelty the movie wouldn’t have if it were just another group of twenty-somethings waiting to get picked off. The bright colors and goofy characters stop feeling quite so harmless when kids are caught in the middle of them.

Cristin Milioti is very good as Grace, a mother who knows something is wrong even as that feeling begins unraveling the life she already has. She gives the movie something real to hold onto while everything around her gets increasingly insane.

Topher Grace is decent as her husband, but at times he seems a little too willing to write her off. I get that he’s at the end of his rope. I just wanted him to listen to his wife for a damn minute.

Then there are all the little things this movie throws at you that somehow make the madness even better. Michael Shannon voices a puppet, something I never knew I needed until now. Patton Oswalt voices Strappy, a talking backpack, and Clint Howard gets a quick little appearance that fits this whole strange world perfectly.

As much as I enjoyed all of this insanity, though, Buddy left me with one pretty big problem:

What is any of this?

Magic? Aliens? Another dimension? Muppets gone rogue?

I have no idea.

And that bothered me more the longer I thought about it.

I don’t need a giant mythology dump. In fact, with a movie like this, the less you know going in, the better. But give me something. Some kind of rule. Some idea of what Buddy is or why any of this is happening.

Even Freddy got the furnace side chat.

That was enough. You understood the basic nightmare without somebody stopping the movie to explain every little idea. Buddy never gives us that little bit of footing, and for me it leaves an empty space underneath all the madness.

Buddy is weird, funny, nasty and completely committed to being its own thing. I wanted a little more underneath all the madness, but there’s no denying that Keegan-Michael Key and Casper Kelly have created something memorable. Maybe that’s all Buddy really needs to be right now.

For years we joked about Barney.

Maybe you shouldn't poke the chubby singing puppet.