‘Buddy’ Review: Casper Kelly’s Bloodthirsty Riff on ‘Barney’ Is the First Great Midnight Movie of 2026

Sundance: The "Too Many Cooks" auteur appears to have finally received a budget worthy of his talents, and he makes full use of it by playing his greatest hits on a multiplex-worthy scale.

Ever since he released the viral Adult Swim sitcom intro pastiche “Too Many Cooks” in 2014, Casper Kelly has been inching closer and closer to a true mainstream breakout. Subsequent projects — from the Cheddar Goblin in “Mandy” and the video game streaming satire “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough” to the meta horror film “Adult Swim Yule Log” and its clever 2024 sequel — have all established him as an auteur with instantly recognizable stylistic preferences. His obsessions include the quirks of disposable family media from the ’80s and ’90s, the hand-crafted set design and puppetry that went into making the aforementioned analog slop, and treating post-production additions like end credits and theme songs as real in-universe occurrences that characters have to navigate. And most of all, he appears to love nothing more than introducing you to one type of media before revealing that you’ve actually been watching something entirely different.

His new film “Buddy” gives Kelly the chance to play all of those hits on the biggest canvas of his career. The results are electric. A nesting doll of media that begins with a meticulous recreation of a kids’ TV show that quickly turns bloody, the film proceeds to take audiences down a rabbit hole that transcends mediums and timelines as a group of cute kids try to figure out how to stop a giant orange unicorn from murdering them. It’s as twisty and stimulating as Kelly’s most complicated work, but it’s all wrapped in a premise that’s simple enough to reach beyond his core audience: What if “Barney” was a horror movie?

Within the film, “Buddy” is a “Barney”-style show that follows a group of kids who live with a talking unicorn, his anthropomorphic rabbit roommate, and a coterie of talking household items (like Strappy the backpack and Mr. Mailbox). Like so many of these children’s shows, nobody ever questions where their parents are. Their lives play out in 22-minute increments where they go on some kind of adventure in the backyard, learn a lesson, then receive a hug from Buddy the Unicorn and sing a song about how much they love him. This prompts a series of names to scroll in front of their eyes (they don’t realize that it’s end credits), and their lives immediately reset for the next episode. Anything they broke is instantly repaired, and crucially, any damage done to their bodies is instantly healed.

It’s all fine and good until Buddy starts killing kids! Much of the film’s brilliance lies in the juxtaposition between the simplicity of its concept and the complexity of its execution. The orange unicorn is never given a fleshed out reason for turning into a killer, and he doesn’t need one. He just starts brutally murdering any child who disobeys him — and every time one dies, they’re instantly replaced by a new kid who has no memory of ever being anywhere else.

The surviving kids begin to suspect something is up, but their attempts to appeal to this world’s sad excuses for adult supervision — a jolly mailman, a blank-faced nurse, and a talking train — just lead to more murders. With nobody alive to help them, the kids begin to plot their own escape. But every time they come close to breaking free or killing Buddy, the mascot manages to hug them and sing his song, which restores order and negates their efforts.

Meanwhile, in a completely separate world, Grace (Cristin Milioti), is having an existential crisis. She lives a normal suburban life with her husband Ben (Topher Grace) and two kids, but for some reason she feels like something is profoundly wrong. Her instincts point her towards the improbable conclusion that they actually had a third kid that they’ve forgotten about. That’s a hard enough pill for Ben to swallow, and she doesn’t make things any easier for him when she reveals her gut feeling that the mystery kid’s disappearance is somehow connected to a forgotten children’s TV show from 1999 that has been erased from the internet. When nobody is willing to take her claim seriously — which, it must be stated, is objectively understandable here even though she ends up being correct — she embarks on an odyssey of her own that takes her to the heart of the “Buddy” mystery.

While Kelly’s dark humor and conceptual ambition are the main attraction, “Buddy” would also be worth seeing for the production design alone. From talking flowers to levitating ventriloquist dummies, Kelly’s team does an immaculate job of recreating the aesthetic of a ’90s kids’ TV set — and then expanding it to show what you’d see if you ever made it beyond the confines of a soundstage. In the same way that one could enjoy spending an “Avatar” movie looking at strange flora and fauna while ignoring the story, a different brand of cinephile could probably have a damn good evening just staring at the sets and props of “Buddy.”

Simply put, “Buddy” is everything you could want from a midnight movie. It gets harder and harder to find something that feels fresh enough to be truly shocking and executed competently enough to transcend its gimmicks, and we should all celebrate when we find one. “‘Barney’ as a horror movie” and “‘Too Many Cooks’ as a feature” are both enticing enough value propositions, but combine both of them and you’re well on your way to cult classic status.

Grade: B+

“Buddy” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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