Ah, to sit high and mighty above the rest of the filmgoing degenerates, sorting through the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ of art from atop a shimmering high horse. It’s a glorious, self-righteous position that cinephiles often find themselves in reflexively, and it’s also an intellectual dead end. Labeling something as craven, immoral, or in need of censorship is the Code Red of movie discourse, a conversation ender that would make Tipper Gore proud, though not all jostling for an ethical leg up is born of desire for visible superiority. Sometimes, a new flick just doesn’t pass the right v. wrong smell test, and any attempts to ignore the stench end in prudish handwringing all the same. Describing Bubby, late summer’s word-of-mouth horror hit, as debased is more factual than critical, a tag that first time feature director Casper Kelly is actively courting from first frame to last. It was always bound to have half its audience clutching pearls while the other doubled over with laughter, which is a roundabout way of saying that it’s actually onto something. Thoughts exist within its fuzzy orange mind, and they are fascinating. They also might be evil.

This comes as a surprise, given that Buddy’s premise initially reads as a hybrid of dare and troll job. Wearing its Barney and Friends and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse inspirations on its sleeve, Kelly’s debut lays its scene in the world of 1990s children’s television, where its eponymous fuzzy, creamsicle-colored unicorn hosts an all-ages program named It’s Buddy. The string of fabricated episodes that opens the movie initially scans as more cloying than dangerous, defined by neon clothing, life lessons, and innumerable clumsy song-and-dance numbers. But when one of the kiddos has had enough of the forced niceties, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) starts giving into the malevolent undercurrent that’s ever-present and percolating in this strain of childhood entertainment.

Casper and co-screenwriter Jamie King are hardly the first to point out the unnerving nature of yesteryear’s cuddly, dead-eyed mascots and their lingering pop cultural debris. The Five Nights at Freddy’s films and video games are the most obvious point of comparison, but there’s also connective tissue here with the grisly, B-movie cash grabs that cropped up when Disney characters started entering the public domain (Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, The Mouse Trap, Screamboat) as well as 2026 summer smash Backrooms. Where that latter hit relied on erstwhile creature comforts to situate viewers in an itchy uncanny valley, Buddy employs a lapsed form of pop culture to have us question what Millennials were fed during their formative years. The idea isn’t novel, but where most flicks that twist relics of youth into something tortured and violent do so by inserting them into a recognizable horror apparatus, Casper makes the chills and thrills come to him.

Commitment to the bit has hardly seen a better filmic example, with the heads of production design, set decoration, and costuming (Anna Kathleen, Teresa Strebler, and Shawna-Nova Foley, respectively) recreating the look and feel of those mothballed programs down to the centimeter, all captured with era-appropriate graininess by cinematographer Zach Kuperstein. Were it not for Buddy’s immediate turn to villainy, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the movie’s opening half hour for a PBS marathon from three decades ago, complete with end credits. It’s so convincing and well-conceived that when Casper finally turns his focus to the real world, a little letdown is inevitable, but his pivot isn’t due to lack of courage. If anything, it evidences a storyteller wholly undaunted by boundaries, be they social or structural.

Gleefully skipping back and forth between realities and timelines, Buddy’s avant garde arrangement somehow only works in its favor, and not just because it allows Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace to join the proceedings. All the hopscotching permits Casper and King to remain several steps ahead of their sucker-punched audience while helpfully undermining the seriousness of their endeavor. In a more straight-faced affair, the film’s yawning maw of plotholes and hazily rendered in-world rules would prove damning, but the insistence on letting it rip sees all these concerns fade away amidst the onslaught of ideas and carnage. Not that Casper is just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks; the overt references to Insidious, Poltergeist, Videodrome, and The Night of the Hunter betray a filmmaker who’s done his homework and understands the history of the medium. Perhaps even a bit too well.

Because Buddy isn’t satisfied with keeping its dark insinuations at surface level, and displays just as keen an interest in what went on behind those 90’s cameras as in front of them. It’s in direct conversation with Quiet on Set, the 2024 documentary series focused on the rampant abuse and mistreatment of a generation of child stars, which is touchy even in a non-fiction space. Within an invented narrative, watching the trust and affection of elementary schoolers be weaponized against them may be clear-eyed, but it’s ghastly and vile as well. Even the suggestion of further harms would be hard to stomach, but an adult character’s comments on one of his youthful co-star’s comely appearance are uttered with intention. Worse still, the sight of a grown man, eight feet tall in costume, baring down on an immobilized child will now live rent free in the mind of all ticket-buyers.

Not that we see the grown-up in question; Buddy goes to great lengths to establish its titular foe as a living, breathing antagonist without a human inside all that fabric. In stripping the unicorn of its presupposed performer, Casper gestures not toward individual criminals but at the pernicious children’s entertainment system writ large, a gavel that bangs all the louder during a climax that will have parents thinking twice next time they allow their charges to watch something unattended. His points are salient, and his heart is in the right, curdled place, but like Buddy himself, there’s nothing substantive behind the facade. For all its architectural ingenuity and reckless whistleblowing, Buddy doesn’t add anything new to the discourse, only images you might wish you hadn’t seen. It’s not scary, exactly, but it is deeply upsetting, which isn’t as fun as it sounds, especially in light of the performers necessary for its construction. In order to spin a yarn about the wickedness we haphazardly expose our children to, Casper and company had to go out and find a pack of eight-year-olds to pantomime the afflictions at the heart of their thesis. It’s quite the ouroboros, too tangled up in itself to fully unknot, and too troubling to ignore. Forgive the puritanical language, but Buddy is a sinner, and practically begs for a good scolding.