Buddy (FrightFest 2026)

In the brief frenzy of deal-making that followed Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Mattel executive Kevin McKeon said the company was developing an “A24-style” Barney the Dinosaur movie with Daniel Kaluuya which would be “leaning into the millennial angst of the property”. At this, the world rose and spoke with one voice: mate, what?! A taster of what this absolutely bizarre prospect might look like comes with Buddy, a new film by Casper Kelly which had its UK premiere at this year’s FrightFest. The titular Buddy is an orange unicorn rather than a purple dinosaur, but otherwise his mannerisms are mischievously recognisable: a deep, chuckling voice, a pear-shaped figure rendered in fuzzy felt, a habit of improvising moralistic songs with the children he surrounds himself with.

This is no Asylum-style mockbuster, though. Its status as an auteur piece becomes clear when you learn Casper Kelly’s biggest prior hit was his 2014 short Too Many Cooks, which aired unannounced on Adult Swim at four in the morning and quickly took over the internet. Starting off as a bouncy pastiche of 1980s sitcom opening credits, Too Many Cooks quickly accelerated from cosy to baffling to alarming, a trick Kelly repeated in the two Adult Swim Yule Log broadcasts from 2022 to 2024 that represent his first feature-length works.

The joke underpinning the ostensibly random insanity of Too Many Cooks is that the universe of old network television shows, with their exhausting episode counts and repetitive stories, might be a kind of hell. Buddy takes that subtext and makes it the central storyline. At first, we’re thrown into a horribly convincing recreation of It’s Buddy, Buddy’s star vehicle, in which the cheerful unicorn helps his child friends overcome their fear of dancing. But then one of them goes missing, and something even stranger happens – the other children remember him. The reset button that ensures everything snaps back to normal in the next episode has been broken, and the kids have to find out why.

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In this first stretch, Buddy is a masterclass in pastiche. Composer Michael Yezerski and production designer Anna Kathleen create a horribly convincing Dayglo ’90s kids-show world (the end credits of each episode of It’s Buddy date the programme to 1999). Keegan-Michael Key’s vocal performance as Buddy is astonishingly committed, maintaining a larger-than-life jocularity even when Buddy is saying things like “Go back into the clubhouse! This does not concern you!” Even the blood is aesthetically consistent: in the unlikely event that one of these preschool programmes would feature blood splatter, you can believe it would look like this.

If it went on in this vein, it would probably drive the audience crazier than Buddy. Even so, the jump to the real world sees Buddy hit some serious problems. The film restarts after a few episodes of It’s Buddy, and unfortunately this means switching from an uncannily well-observed parody aesthetic to no apparent aesthetic at all. The real-world section opens with a mother, played by the great Cristin Milioti, haunted by the suspicion that she should have one more child than she does. It could work as a parody of the post-Babadook/Hereditary wave of trauma-horror, which would be a bold and mischievous thing to do. Equally, it could be played for total, documentary-style realism, the biggest contrast imaginable with the world of It’s Buddy. The result suggests Kelly never quite decided how to handle this strand of the film. It’s visually flat, light on suspense, and even with actors as good as Milioti and Topher Grace it never gets inside the characters’ heads.

From hereon in, the invention becomes more fitful. There are still strong elements – the child performances, led by If I Had Legs I’d Kick You‘s Delaney Quinn, are uncommonly good – and moments of weirdo invention. As the kids escape further and further into Buddy’s TV world, they come across the detritus of youth programming from the past, including a wonderful cameo from Clint Howard as a neglected ventriloquist’s doll. This repurposing of junk television as existential horror is exactly what Casper Kelly has always specialised in, but comparing Buddy to his previous work only reminds you that his 14-minute film has a greater quantity and quality of ideas than his 96-minute one. It is possible that moving out of the stoner-friendly berth of Adult Swim and onto a feature film with multiple production companies – including, amusingly, ’90s kids’-show behemoth Saban Films – has led Kelly to dilute his work, to intersperse the moments of inspired madness he excels at with more conventional horror elements. If so, it’s a case of too many… well, you know.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – BUDDY