In every generation, there is a kids TV show that absolutely confounds parents, annoys the heck out of them, but also makes them incredibly glad their children have found something that will keep them quiet long enough that they can use the bathroom in peace. Let’s be honest, screen time can be useful. I have no idea what the little kids of today are watching. Probably Gabby’s Dollhouse. Paw Patrol seems like a strong possibility. Buddy, however, feels very much targeted at the Barney generation, even including a song with different lyrics that sounds suspiciously close to something Barney would sing. There’s also the voice Keegan-Michael Key provides for the titular orange unicorn, which immediately taps into that aggressively cheerful children’s television host energy. For me, I grew up with a giant yellow bird and three humans named Sharon, Lois, and Bram and an elephant. I’m not really the Barney, Teletubbies, Blue’s Clues, or Bear in the Big Blue House generation. I come before that. I did enjoy Pee-wee’s Playhouse on Saturday mornings until the world decided we couldn’t enjoy Pee-wee’s Playhouse anymore for reasons everybody knows by now, which were kind of silly. Yet I still feel like I got all of the references Buddy is throwing at me.

Buddy seeks to exploit our childhood memories, regardless of which show was your favorite during your preschool years, and bring them together in this fever dream that is insatiably bizarre and unapologetically nihilistic. Buddy the Unicorn is one of the freshest things we’ve gotten in 2026, and director Casper Kelly, the guy who gave us Too Many Cooks for Adult Swim, once again finds a way to turn nostalgia against his audience and use it for nefarious purposes. He starts us off right in the middle of a children’s television program where Buddy seems to be going about the usual business of teaching life lessons until things start going horribly wrong. While everyone is learning the important lesson that you have to be scared in order to be brave, poor Josh, played by Luke Speakman, decides he doesn’t want to dance with everybody else. He’d rather read a book. Buddy isn’t having it. This does not go well for Josh. Eventually, the other kids realize Josh is missing, and they come to the startling conclusion that perhaps Buddy has been lying to them about exactly what happened to him. From there, things get dark. Very dark. And very weird.

Oddly, it’s all very much on brand for anyone who has ever watched one of these children’s shows before. You have the mix of puppets, animatronic characters, adult humans who appear in some form, and kids at the center of everything so the children watching at home have someone to relate to. Some shows like Pee-wee’s Playhouse just had their lead adult act like a child. Arguably, so did Blue’s Clues. But many of them, including Barney and Sesame Street, utilized children as a way of giving their audience an easier window into this fantasy world created just for them. Buddy eventually becomes a survival journey for the remaining children as they and the other inhabitants of Buddy’s world try to survive this murderous unicorn. There’s clearly some kind of unnatural magic keeping everyone inside Buddy’s world, and that’s one of the most interesting choices Casper Kelly makes. This isn’t simply a television set populated by actors. The kids don’t seem to understand that they’re trapped inside a children’s television series. Imagine watching Blue’s Clues, except Steve wasn’t actually an actor capable of leaving when filming ended. He really was trapped there with a cartoon blue dog even when you weren’t watching. That’s closer to how Buddy’s world operates, leaving this little group of kids constantly at the whims of Buddy’s bizarre magic.

Kelly uses that concept to great effect because, like every show of this kind, almost everything can talk. There’s Charlie the Train, an obvious nod to Thomas the Tank Engine. Patton Oswalt voices Strappy, an anthropomorphic backpack, and there are all sorts of other bizarre characters scattered throughout the film. Michael Shannon voices Willie, a ventriloquist dummy partnered with George, played by Clint Howard, and let’s just say George and Willie have a very special bond. I particularly laughed at the flowers. That was an inspired sequence. Buddy keeps finding increasingly strange things lurking around its corners, but because Kelly has established this world as one where basically anything can become sentient, every new monstrosity somehow makes perfect sense. That’s part of the joke. Children’s television has always asked kids to accept worlds where backpacks, clocks, mailboxes, trains, flowers, dinosaurs, and whatever the hell else might suddenly start talking to them. Buddy just asks what happens when those same rules are used against you.

For a long time, kids in horror movies lived because it was almost taboo to do otherwise, especially the younger the kid. There’s been a bit of a resurgence recently in the willingness to put children in actual danger, likely helped by the enormous success of It Chapter One. Underground horror splatter fests like Terrifier take no prisoners and seem intentionally designed to provoke, while more mainstream horror has increasingly been willing to push younger characters into darker territory. Earlier this summer we had Ice Cream Man, where the kids took over. Last year we had Weapons, where kids were in danger. Welcome to Derry had a very memorable pilot. Now we have Buddy, where children are yet again fighting for survival. Here, I would say the majority of the more violent, gory deaths we actually see are given to adults and puppets, while Kelly often cuts away if a kid is killed. He seems to know exactly where that line is and doesn’t want to cross it so aggressively that he completely loses his audience. Buddy wants to play a little more broadly than something aimed exclusively at hardcore horror fans, the kind of people who showed up to Ice Cream Man expecting something very different from what they probably got.

For me, Buddy also reminded me of several other dark comedies built around corrupted childhood entertainment, including some that didn’t work with audiences at the time. The Happytime Murders is a more recent example and still hasn’t really found a cult following. Two decades ago, we had Death to Smoochy, Danny DeVito’s dark comedy that didn’t find its audience upon release, largely because the studio had no idea how to market it and audiences had no idea what to do with it. That one has at least found somewhat of a following since. There’s also Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles, which is even older. So puppets and animatronics going horribly wrong isn’t entirely new. But Buddy is also different from something like Five Nights at Freddy’s, which positions its animatronics as threatening almost from the beginning. Buddy’s world is supposed to be happy. That’s what makes it work. Keegan-Michael Key seems to know exactly what to bring to Buddy at every moment, whether there’s a hint of whimsy or a whole lot of nightmare fuel in whatever he’s doing or saying. Even Buddy himself seems to be balancing this dichotomy. This world is supposed to be his happy place, if everybody would just follow his rules and do exactly what he says.

There’s even part of the plot that hinges on Buddy’s ability to reset the world and himself, but he needs everything to be in certain places in order to do it. Once everything resets, everyone forgets the tragedy that befell them. Buddy gets repaired. His world gets repaired. Everything goes back to normal. Except these kids are starting to wise up, and all of those lessons they’ve apparently learned for however long they’ve been trapped inside this series are becoming useful as they strike out and try to escape this childlike hellscape. It’s almost like The Truman Show for little kids who have nightmares. Delaney Quinn is especially strong as Freddy, who emerges as the center of this group, and considering how young these actors are, asking them to do what they have to do here while somehow explaining the context of this completely insane movie must have been a challenge. Yet every one of them rises to the occasion. This is a great cast of young actors. I never felt like seeing Ice Cream Man, but I did see people complaining about the child actors used in that film. Here, they found a collection of kids who all seem to have bright futures ahead of them. It reminded me a little bit of The Black Phone, where even the kids who briefly appeared as ghosts seemed capable of knocking out some serious dramatic work. No matter how much time each kid spends in Buddy’s world, they commit to the insanity around them.

The biggest problem for me comes when Buddy leaves Buddy. There’s a subplot involving Cristin Milioti as Grace and Topher Grace as her husband, Ben, existing outside the Buddy universe, with Grace gradually realizing that something is deeply wrong and somehow connected to this forgotten children’s program. I thought this material was ill-timed and possibly unnecessary. The parts of Buddy I liked the most were basically everything leading up to the introduction of Grace and Ben and then everything after we return to the kids. In other words, Buddy’s world. Whenever we were spending time in the real world, I didn’t find it nearly as interesting. Because the child actors are so strong and the mythology of Buddy’s universe is so compelling, I think the film could have survived almost entirely on their shoulders. Structurally, I would have either shuffled the script around to introduce Grace and Ben later or seriously considered eliminating most of that material altogether. There’s nothing wrong with Milioti or Grace as performers. It’s simply that every minute spent outside this deranged children’s show made me want to get back inside it.

This is a very weird and twisted film, and I’m glad it has audio description for its theatrical release. I’m also glad Buddy is getting a theatrical release at all, although when I went to see how it was faring locally in my metro area, I noticed theaters that were essentially giving it half a screen with just two showtimes a day. That’s going to make it really hard for Buddy to crack the top ten at the box office, so it’s going to need people to actually show up. If you feel like horror is repetitive and redundant, you’re tired of exorcism movies, and you’ve developed that been-there-done-that feeling every time you show up to the theater, 2026 has thankfully delivered some pretty amazing big swings. Whether it’s Obsession, Backrooms, Hokum, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, or whatever else your poison has been, this has been a pretty strong year for horror films willing to try something different. Buddy deserves points simply for understanding exactly what it is satirizing and doing a damn good job of it.

I’m not saying Buddy is a perfect film. Structurally, I would make changes, particularly with the real-world subplot. But I had a blast with it as someone who, even though I wasn’t in preschool when Barney came out, still remembers his theme song along with way too many children’s TV shows from the ‘90s, which is the era Buddy seems particularly steeped in. The more you understand pop culture, likely the more you’ll understand Buddy and like it in return. It reminded me a little bit of a film I saw earlier this year called Obex, which was extremely low budget but also involved stepping into a strange, hyper-realized fantasy world. Buddy clearly has considerably more money behind it, but what matters is that everything feels handled by a self-assured director with a clear idea of what he wants to say. Casper Kelly knows this particular flavor of pop-culture nightmare, and I feel like I received his message exactly the way he intended.

Buddy may not be for everybody. I can absolutely see people walking out because they won’t understand it tonally. You have to accept what it is and be willing to go on the ride. Chances are, if you watch the trailer for Buddy and it already doesn’t feel like your thing, it probably isn’t. But if you watch that trailer and immediately think this is totally your vibe, it probably is. Buddy is exactly as advertised: a darkly hilarious, occasionally terrifying foray into what it might actually be like if you were trapped inside a children’s television show where the relentlessly cheerful mascot was also an unhinged tyrant. It’s funny, violent, strange, nostalgic, and occasionally feels like someone left a children’s television VHS tape baking in the sun until it became cursed.

Fresh: 7.9/10