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Did anyone ever trust that purple dinosaur? A curdled mug of nostalgia for adult-size puppets leading children around candy-hued soundstage sets, “Buddy” is a horror comedy scraped from the fuzzy lining of low-rent kiddie programming.
Director Casper Kelly, a graduate of Adult Swim’s warped late-night gewgaws (“Too Many Cooks”) who wrote this movie with Jamie King, drops us right into a classically ’90s-era moppet time-waster. The titular orange unicorn (voiced to maximum adenoidal effect by Keegan-Michael Key) is both master of playtime for a quartet of boys and girls and a font of wisdom (“You gotta be scared to be brave!”), usually expressed in insipid songs and accompanied by elementary dance moves. Thanks to the rigorously retro-cheap aesthetics of the film’s crack design team (production designer Anna Kathleen, costume designer Shawna-Nova Foley and puppet creator Devon Hawkes Ludlow), your memories of being tube-babysat will be triggered.
Credits roll and a new episode starts, but is this show business or a contained world? That proves to be a complicated question when one surly boy’s disappearance after refusing to play along with Buddy leads a suspicious Freddy (Delaney Quinn) and her friend Wade (Caleb Williams) to wonder if all is not right with their large furry guardian, who seems genuinely disturbed by defiance or lack of affection. (“Is he sick?” “Yes, but not like a cold — in the head!”) When they witness Buddy outright murdering cheery Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki), suddenly the notion of escaping to the whispered-about metropolis known as Diamond City sounds like a necessity.
Once outside the walls of Buddyland and into the surrounding wilderness, Kelly shifts from boxy TV framing and video texture to a cinematic widescreen ratio, but the milieu still seems half-real, half-stylized. Freddy’s backpack Strappy (Patton Oswalt) still talks, but the kids suddenly sound a little more adult and self-conscious, as if freed somehow (even though they’re being hunted by Buddy).
Another transition, as if someone had switched channels to a prestige family drama (kudos to the many hats cinematographer Zach Kuperstein wears), takes us to a regular modern-day suburban street. There we meet Grace (the perfectly cast Cristin Milioti), a harried mom with two boys, a bland husband (Topher Grace) and the nagging dread that there’s a violent emptiness in their lives they aren’t addressing. Also, why is that horned carrot-colored creature on the television beckoning her?
The melding of these separate dimensions, which include nods to not just the obvious touchstones (“Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) but “The Wizard of Oz,” “Poltergeist” and “The Night of the Hunter,” becomes the emotional underpinning of Kelly’s feature, his first in theaters. Granted, this could easily have been a gory few minutes on the brilliantly twisted mid-aughts kid-show satire “Wonder Showzen,” and if there’s a rip in the bloodstained fabric of Kelly’s semi-philosophical blend of laughs and terror, it’s that, unlike a short, a little of “Buddy” goes a long way. Then again, that was always the problem with so many children’s shows, wasn’t it? Packaged innocence became a form of mind-obliterating torture. Growing up seemed the only way out.
Ultimately, though, Kelly, who has one more trick up his sleeve, wisely refrains from explaining his universe beyond the concept’s commitment to an unspoken, latent menace inside every bargain knockoff of “Sesame Street” or “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He keeps “Buddy” enjoyably weird to the end, its horror soul in line with the creepypasta ethos of something undefined yet eternal. Sleep tight, parents!
The post It’s playtime, kids, but don’t even think of escaping ‘Buddy,’ a twisted faux-’90s artifact appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
