At this point, it’s hard to remember when – if ever – clowns and puppets weren’t primarily scary rather than funny. Even the trend for depicting Gen X clown/puppet-related children’s TV entertainment as sinister or horrific goes back as far as Child’s Play, Meet the Feebles and Death to Smoochy – with the Banana Splits given a horror reboot, fast food mascots rioting in the 5 Nights at Freddy’s franchise and various outofcopyrightsploitation quickies turning Pooh, Mickey Mouse or Popeye into rote slasher villains. Directed by Casper Kelly, who also co-wrote with Jamie King, Buddy – like Smoochy – is inspired by Barney the Dinosaur, a franchise I’m too old and too British to be more than vaguely aware of … UK-TV puppets tend to be less saccharine, to the point when it wouldn’t make sense to have Basil Brush go feral in a henhouse or unleash the Teletubbies as kaiju. However, by osmosis, I’ve picked up enough of a sense of what Barney and Friends was like to understand what Kelly is going for in Buddy – which elaborates on the idea that Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key), a big orange unicorn who wants to be your friend, is really a monster but also develops the strange limbo of his eternal studio show It’s Buddy (copyrighted 1999) and comes up with a wider world (in various aspect ratios) which has been thought through though you have to pick up on the rules as you go along.
The first go-round is a more or less straight pastiche episode with Buddy leading a group of perky, brightly-costumed kids in songs which sell messages (‘You Have to be Scared to be Brave’) as they stay in Buddy’s garden, which has a few adult regulars (a mailman and a nurse) and a host of big-eyed talking objects like Strappy the Backpack (Patton Oswalt), Charlie the Train (Devon Hawkes Ludlow) and Mr Mailbox (Eric Bauza). The lead kids are Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Oliver (Tristan Borders) and Wade (Caleb C.J. Williams, whose parents must be big William Godwin fans), who join in enthusiastically when Buddy throws a dance party. But Josh (Luke Speakman) doesn’t want to dance, even when blessed-cursed with dancing shoes, and just wants to sit and read his book (A Wrinkle in Reality). Buddy tries to get Josh enthused, but this token resistance ruffles the hyperactive fun machine – and by the next episode Josh has been replaced by Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan) and that book is found bloodied in the trash. Among the conventions is a group hug between Buddy and the kids that rolls credits – pay attention to them, there are clever jokes embedded – and acts as a partial reset, at least for Buddy. Given that this is playing at FrightFest, it’s not a giveaway to say that Buddy is a dangerous narcissist given to violent rage when his good cheer is challenged – and his soft furry horn can still impale a child.
Given the prominence of an orange narcissist in US public life, there’s a possible political subtext – and Buddy is surprisingly well-developed (moreso than the Freddy’s critters – who are all design, no character), too hyper when up, slyly manipulative and flat-out brutal when he loses patience. It’s dark that Buddy is a serial child murderer but the film also shocks with its treatment of anthropomorphised objects – a talking mailbox rendered mute when its lid is torn off is unexpectedly poignant and disturbing. After several ‘episodes’ , Freddy and survivors break out of the academy frame garden into a widescreen fantasyworld with Wizard of Oz overtones – they are on a quest to Diamond City and some hallucinogenic flowers are involved – and something of the look of those disturbing East German fairytales of the 1950s and ‘60s. Meanwhile, in a realer world, suburban Mom Grace (Cristin Milioti, from Palm Springs and The Penguin) is unaccountably terrified by an unused chair at the table, a glimpse of It’s Buddy on TV (and no trace of the show on the internet) and a nagging sense that something has been taken from her … though her smug husband (Topher Grace) and two sons pooh-pooh her concerns, even after she calls in a psychic (Brooke Bloom) to read the house. When Buddy throttles the nurse, Grace is sucked through a flatscreen TV and made-over as a replacement regular. A welcome hug from Buddy sets off her spidey sense for male creepiness … and she also becomes wary of the overbearing creature, who has a spell as a Phantom-scarred grotesque after use of dangerous cleaning fluids and later manifests in an even grimmer ‘Dark Buddy’ form.
Several more levels of reality are explored, sketching in a how-Buddy-went-bad backstory (there used to be three unicorns, and one terrified specimen is found under the Worry Well) but also visiting a Backrooms/Cabin in the Woods-style interzone which seems to be the operating system of this universe. Milioti, a superstar waiting to happen, gives a potent performance as the grown-up but the kids are great too and Key demonstrates remarkable range as Buddy. Also with the Clint Howard and the voice of Michael Shannon as a grown-up lost boy and a cowboy puppet.