Even while some still insist that movies will never return to the epicenter of pop culture, it’s remarkable how American films continue to mirror, echo, and illustrate the collective subconscious. Political hipsterism may have swallowed the culture industry whole in 2016, but try as the media mites might, they know their current place in the center of the culture won’t hold. Where does an aspiring “transgressive” artist go in a world where graphic violence, sexual assault, coarse language, and bodily vulgarity are fodder for mainstream entertainment, even commercials? You go to the movies, it’s some kind of horror: slasher, psychological, elevated; you watch a baseball game (or election coverage) and are bombarded with commercials for laxatives and erectile dysfunction; you try to listen to some new pop music, and even they’ve gone scatological. Forget about social media, a sewer by any other name.
Buddy is a new horror film that’s arrived a few years too late to be anything but the same old, same old by now. 2026 was the year that horror proved it was the theatrical genre of the decade, and for the first time in cinema history: among the many successful legacy sequels (and one excellent legacy spoof), there was Backrooms but especially Obsession, a true word-of-mouth hit that wasn’t christened by the media beforehand, nor pushed especially hard by its distributor or hyped beyond hope at its initial premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Curry Barker’s film took off in a way that proves all the wannabe Woodward and Bernsteins wrong: they will never inherit the Earth, because ultimately the general audience always gets to decide who stays and who goes.
The premise and beats of Buddy are lazy and boring at this point: we begin in a fictional children’s television show clearly modeled after Barney the Dinosaur. The title character’s an orange unicorn that has the big dumb voice you’d expect and the same banal lessons to teach to a rainbow coalition of children. The show is presented in 4:3 aspect ratio, and as each episode ends, the screen glitches out to a cloudy sky in 1:85; when the kids escape the set after Buddy inevitably goes bad (shocker), the screen ratio shifts to 2:35, another unmotivated aesthetic choice in a film chock full of them.
Director and co-writer Casper Kelly has been working in children’s entertainment since the late-1990s, beginning with the excellent and underrated CatDog and working through the prime Adult Swim years that produced Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, and Harvey Birdman! Attorney at Law, just a few of the still fresh shows that premiered on the Cartoon Network offshoot in the early-2000s (among the best were Aqua Teen, Sealab 2021, and Tom Goes to the Mayor, the only thing Tim Heidecker touched that hasn’t completely decomposed). You’d think he’d have more “to say” about the form, but Buddy is closer to the intelligence and sophistication of a Millennial or Zoomer also-ran, who as a rule dismiss subtlety and nuance because they never bothered to learn about it.
Buddy isn’t among the great kids show spoofs—maybe because there’s just one, 2002’s Death to Smoochy. But that movie worked because it was about the business behind children’s entertainment, not the shows themselves. Lacking a certain level of cultural awareness and sophistication, too many contemporary filmmakers lean on the few tropes and images still left unexplored by cinema and arguably still transgressive in the culture at large. It’s all as subtle as a sledgehammer: body mutilation, extreme gore, and most disturbing, the mangling and corruption of children. Buddy has a remarkable amount of bloody children: Buddy impales one of his “little friends” who later reappears with a giant hole in his chest, which he final little girl returns with Buddy’s own impaling, by a talking mailbox of all things. After it’s all over, the little girl gets up, drenched in blood, and you realize you’ve never seen this in a movie before. It’s not one shot, it’s five minutes with this girl impaling Buddy, getting sprayed with blood, and screaming her head off.
And to what end? The film’s symptomatic of a broader societal contempt for children that appears to be growing stronger by the month: the shocking amount of support that Lindsay Clancy received this summer, the soaring sales of adult toys at Toys 'R' Us, the reprehensible behavior of New York Times Education Czar Nikole Hannah-Jones and the insane fawning she received for sending her daughter to a lousy school for a decade and admitting she was wrong (which, one reporter said, “everyone knows is the hardest thing to do.” What?) Earlier today I saw a story about a woman abandoning her newborn baby in an Uber and thousands of comments defending her. “What, you expect a teenager to raise a baby?” Yeah man. It’s been happening for thousands of years. Buddy isn’t a good film, but it is of our time, and that should make you sick to your stomach.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM