Movie Review: Buddy

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A-

A horror comedy that is just as hilarious as it is unsettling. 

If you were to describe this movie to me, I would think that I would hate it. The idea of a Barney-like kids show mascot (an orange unicorn in this case) that snaps and tries to kill the kids sounds like a one joke premise that would get old very quickly. Amazingly that is not the case here at all. 

As this film starts it is a pure absurdist comedy. As an absurdist comedy, it is actually hilarious. The reason for this is simple. While lesser hands would simply use having a lot of gore in what should be a child friendly setting as the only joke, the filmmakers don't use gore as a comedic crutch. To be sure, this film can get very gory, but this is far from the only tool at the filmmakers' disposal. Before the first kill, this movie is still an excellent parody of these types of children's shows. It points out the absurdity of these shows in a hilarious way. Making these early scenes all the funnier is that, especially for any of us who grew up with such shows, it is not far from what these shows were actually like. Most great R-rated comedies are just as successful with their clean humor as with their R-rated humor and that is certainly the case here. This also makes the gore all the more entertaining as well. When there are plenty of scenes without this type of gore, it makes the scenes that utilize it all the more effective. 

After these early absurdly funny scenes, the movie did something that took me completely by surprise. It morphed into a quite disturbing horror flick. The backstory of how the kids got here, is quite disturbing. This is an example of the best type of horror, the type that gets creepier the more you think about it. 

For the rest of the movie, the film goes back and forth between dark comedy and straight horror. What is quite outstanding is how well these two elements are mixed. The filmmakers know just when to play the story for laughs and when to play it for horror. The creepy and the comedy mesh together perfectly naturally. Neither gets in the way of the other and there is never too much of either. 

An extremely pleasant surprise.