Look out, Barney... Buddy is here, and he doesn't want to play or make friends. The new horror-comedy from writer and director Casper Kelly gallops into theaters this weekend after already spooking some audiences at AMC's Screen Unseen showtimes. It's packed with twists, turns, and plenty of unicorn-violence, including a Wizard of Oz-inspired adventure. Buddy is being distributed this weekend by Roadside Attractions and could open to as much as $7 million domestically. In a major year for comedy, find out exactly why Buddy stands out as a dark twist on 90s kids TV.
Buddy the Unicorn (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is the star of the show, and Strappy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) is the sure-to-be-fan-favorite talking backpack.
Freddy (Delaney Quinn) is the main child at the center of the story, and Grace (Cristin Milioti) is a crucial piece to the story, mysteriously drawn to It's Buddy! (more on her in the full-spoilers section), with Topher Grace playing Grace's husband.
At San Diego Comic-Con, Kelly told The Direct the movie is "a mix of comedy, horror, a little bit of just straight up drama, and an emotional through line," and that Buddy's design had to stay warm and cuddly: "It can't be like that, it's got to be sweet. I wanted him to look sweet." Quinn, meanwhile, said some sequences got so intense during filming that she genuinely screamed for real.
On the surface, It's Buddy! is a gentle educational show where kids play and learn alongside a giant, talking orange unicorn. But when one child goes off script, the show (and the movie) never looks back, blending the real world, the imaginary, and a very familiar theme turned freakishly wrong.
Full Buddy Plot Explained (Spoilers!)
Inside It's Buddy!
Buddy opens on the set of It's Buddy, a 1999 kids' show, hosted by Buddy, the Barney-sized orange unicorn mascot who leads four child co-stars, plus an adult nurse and mailman, rounding out the grown-up cast, through sing-alongs and mandatory good cheer (emphasis on the mandatory part).
Audiences are met with a quite annoying, repeating theme song for the kids' show, which becomes the clock of the movie, resetting each sequence by starting a new episode.
The set, with different kid-friendly areas like a jungle gym and swing, is clearly inspired by shows like Pee-wee's Playhouse and Barney & Friends.
The core group of kids at the beginning is Freddy, Wade (Caleb Williams), Oliver (Tristan Broders), and Josh (Luke Speakman). The shift into the sinister begins when Josh would rather read on the swing than rehearse a dance number. This is off script, an act that's not supposed to be part of It's Buddy!
Buddy takes him to the Worry Well and gifts him a pair of dance shoes to fix his attitude, but Josh still refuses and tells Buddy he hates him. The episode ends, and over the credits, viewers just hear Buddy grab someone in the dark, clearly taking out Josh off-screen.
A new day dawns, the annoying theme song plays, and Josh is gone, swapped out for a new kid, Hannah (Madison Sky Polan), as if nothing had happened.
Freddy is the only one who clocks it. She finds Josh's blood-soaked storybook in the trash, and when she confronts Buddy, he claims the blood is just red paint and pins the spill on Betty Bunny, another mascot on the show, often found inside the house.
Buddy tells the kids Josh left for Diamond City to chase a dance career. Later, Diamond City will become a key component of the story.
Freddy and Wade don't buy it, and Buddy turns hostile, accusing them of not loving him anymore. When they bring their suspicions to Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki), she confronts Buddy too and is killed for it.
That's enough for Freddy to get wise and devise a plan for the whole group, ready to run for the mysterious Diamond City, a place where they can escape Buddy's totalitarian rule. Unfortunately, Oliver, who has a hard time picking a side, tips Buddy off to the plan.
The kids try to hide, knowing that saying Buddy's name out loud summons him (it's like a magic trick), but Oliver breaks and says it anyway.
Buddy goes full-on rampage mode, tearing through the set (Charlie the Train included) and cutting Wade open while asking him why he's doing this to himself. It's another moment of striking for horrific with (kind of) hilarious.
Freddy luckily does set Buddy on fire, melting half his face, but he's still standing as Wade dies, and the rest of the kids hop the fence, leaving the It's Buddy! set with Freddy's living backpack, Strappy.
Grace's Real-World Nightmare
While the kids run, Buddy cuts over to the real world, where Grace (The Penguin's Cristin Milioti) and her husband Ben are raising two sons in the suburbs. It's a startling change of scenery for viewers, going from such bright colors and fictitious surroundings to the standardized United States household.
We quickly learn there's something off about Grace; she's always felt like she's missing a child, and the signs start small: an empty chair that unsettles her for no clear reason, then a psychic who comes to the house (against Ben's wishes) for a seance, mentioning bad energy.
After being taunted by the It's Buddy! show sporadically playing on her TVs, Buddy eventually pulls her body through the screen, wiping her old identity and replacing the dead Nurse Nancy with a new one: Nurse Grace.
It's later that she realizes Freddy is her missing daughter from the real world. Somehow, Grace and her entire family's minds had been wiped.
This was the moment in Buddy where audiences' minds were opened to a more sci-fi or magical element to the story, with portals to different universes and memory-wiping spells.
Back to the kids who escaped the TV set, they learn that Diamond City isn't the paradise Buddy promised, just a small, empty set piece in this imaginary place.
This is also the time when the kids run into two other escapees hiding out there: Willie (voiced by Michael Shannon), a foul-mouthed ventriloquist dummy, and George (Clint Howard), a deranged, Howdy Doody-style cowboy puppet.
They're easily two of the most bizarre characters in the whole movie, cursing, getting high, and looking out for no one but themselves. Turns out Willie and George ran away from their own broadcast a long time before Freddy's group ever did, and Buddy's been looking for them too. Before anyone can regroup, Buddy gets to the odd duo and kills them both.
Buddy then catches up to the kids but doesn't attack; he just hugs them, since that's the only way an episode is allowed to end, and the show can reset into a new day. Here comes that theme song again.
There is one trick up their sleeves, though. Willie and George had taught Freddy's group a song Buddy hates, and singing it is enough to send him off the rails again, into a killing spree that takes out Betty Bunny, the mailman, and another child, Tyler.
Grace, now fighting to save the daughter she just found on the It's Buddy! set, sacrifices herself at the well so Freddy and the others can slip into the tunnels underneath. Buddy is too big (wide around the waist) to follow them down... at first.
The Ending of Buddy: Explained
Down in the tunnels, Freddy ends up alone. Buddy, of course, catches up; he had sliced his own flesh off to fit down the well. Hannah and Oliver are taken out; this is, after all, a horror movie, not everyone gets a happy ending.
Now he's hunting Freddy. During the chase, Strappy trips him, sending Buddy face-first into the metal mailbox Freddy's been dragging along, and it's finally enough to take him down for good. Applause!
Freddy pushes on and finds a room lined wall-to-wall with screens, a creepy, almost corporate look into the universe-building of It's Buddy!, each one looking into a different real-world house. She dives headfirst through one, expecting to land back with her own family.
Instead, she crashes into the living room of a random family sitting down to dinner, and the moment she crosses over, the magic drains out of everything with her: Strappy and the mailbox go still and lifeless in her arms. Tears.
The confused dad in the doorway just stares at this blood-soaked kid holding a dead backpack, and the movie cuts to black right there, leaving Freddy's actual reunion and the other unicorn fans spotted on the wall of the set wide open for a sequel.
Kelly told The Direct about the lore-building ending and the possibility of a Buddy 2. He shared that not all of the lore even made it into Buddy, "because you want the movie to have mystery." Then added that he has "other ideas about other aspects of our culture that I want to do my spin on:"
"Yeah, I would love to do that. Part of writing it is you develop the underpinning, the rules, and the lore that doesn't all get into the movie, because you want the movie to have mystery.
So absolutely, and I have other ideas about other aspects of our culture that I want to do my spin on. I feel like a kid in a candy store. There's just a lot of things I want to do."
