Buddy: A murderous orange unicorn traps children in a 1999 TV show

Casper Kelly’s debut asks: what if children’s television—all that cheerful safety—harbored violence? An orange unicorn named Buddy kills. Children become trapped in a vintage TV program. The premise is genuinely unsettling. The film can’t decide what to do with it.

Cristin Milioti carries the emotional weight, her terror registering despite tonal inconsistencies. Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, and Patton Oswalt surround her, but the ensemble never coheres. Shannon’s particular menace feels wasted. Key and Oswalt’s comedy sometimes overwhelms momentum. They function as individual actors rather than unified cast.

Kelly’s strength: the recreation of late-’90s children’s television. The aggressive cheerfulness. The relentless positivity that functions as emotional repression. Cinematographer Zach Kuperstein captures the visual vocabulary—Blue’s Clues, Dora, Big Comfy Couch. Every frame could be an actual broadcast. Josh Ethier’s editing maintains this aesthetic even as violence erupts. The form constantly contradicts the content.

The film’s central idea has teeth: children’s entertainment functions as control. Cheerful compliance flattens emotion. Smiling mascots administer surveillance. Kelly reaches toward this, but keeps retreating. He seems caught between wanting to critique children’s television and wanting to celebrate it. Those impulses don’t contradict, but the film can’t generate productive tension between them.

The horror lacks force. Michael Shannon as an orange menace should be disturbing. Instead, moments of genuine disturbance get undercut by absurdism. Michael Yezerski’s score tries to stitch the tones together but increasingly struggles. You sense Kelly understands both the horrifying and the ridiculous. The problem: he can’t make them authentically coexist.

What saves Buddy from disappointment is its commitment to strangeness. The concept itself—desecrating beloved cultural touchstones—carries transgressive power. But transgression requires teeth. The film occasionally pulls back from implications it establishes.

Ultimately Buddy is an interesting failure. The ambition to reveal darkness within aggressively innocent cultural forms has real merit. But the execution demands greater control than Kelly demonstrates. He hints at profundity he can’t quite articulate.