By: Gian Garmendia
Barney wasn’t something I was particularly interested in growing up, I mainly preferred children’s shows with fully animated characters rather than live action kids doing child-like things. Barney also always had a slightly disturbing look to him, his teeth have no gaps between them, a cartoonish thing for a live action show, just didn’t sit right with me. Uncanny. And disturbing is what the movie “Buddy” does best.
Casper Kelly, the movie’s director, had a few questions when making this movie:Where do the kids in Barney go when the episode ends? Do they sleep there? Where are their parents? Enter Buddy, a dark comedy slasher film, staged as a dark parody for the real Barney kids show back in the 90’s.
Buddy is creepy, in a way where its scare factor isn’t imbued within jumpscares or disturbing imagery. In fact, the movie didn’t make me jump at all. It more so made me deeply uncomfortable. As you might have guessed, the unfortunate victims of this film are children, seemingly around 10 years old. These children are trapped in a seemingly separate dimension, in which they are apart of the fictional TV show, “It’s Buddy!”
As you might have also guessed, these children do very similar things to the children in the Barney show such as learning lessons about friendship, expressing their feelings, saying sorry, and other core life lessons a child might need. However, when the episode ends, is when the horror begins. Buddy (an orange unicorn) is a predator. However, his depravity is more shown in allegory form rather than in the movie itself (thankfully).
Children may be watching cartoons in their living room, in which the show “It’s Buddy!” comes onto the screen. Buddy then approaches the camera, and says, “I know I just met you, but I think I love you.” Now that isn’t all he says, but it entirely sums up the mentality behind Buddy.
The unicorn then puts his paw toward the screen, in which the child(in very relatable imaginative fashion) puts their hand toward the screen, thinking they could actually hold hands with this fictional creature. Until they do. Buddy pulls them through the screen, in which they are officially incorporated into the Buddy cast of characters.
The cast usually consists of about 4-5 children, a nurse played by a female adult, and a mailman played by a male adult. And as you’d expect, all of these people are snatched from the real world.
The paranormal part of this comes from the fact that the real world shifts to make it so that these people never existed. The world does not remember them, and they are stripped of their identities. Now there’s a more haunting reason why Buddy kidnaps people into his show, aside from pleasing his own fantasy of being loved.
Buddy is a creature of love, he constantly needs it to be in a good mood. At the end of every episode, the children sing a song about how much they love Buddy while hugging him. But if the children decide, they do not love him, and attempt to escape the show, he abuses, or unfortunately kills them. This bears similarities to cases involving actual sexual predators.
Furthermore, there’s other scenes in the movie that describe the actual effects of child trafficking. When the kids learn about Buddy’s malevolent nature, they attempt to run away to “Diamond City”(which is actually not a city but a very small skyscraper looking prop which looks like a city from afar).
When they are journeying toward this place, they start to break away from their innocence. They start to swear and they come more to terms with reality. One of them even remembers something from their real life. When this cycle of “love” and abuse ends, they start to actually see the world around them for what it is, which is fully embodied when they realize Diamond City is just a prop.
As tragic as this realization is, this truly is a metaphor for a real life terror. If the sexual predator allegory wasn’t shown enough, during this point of the movie, Buddy meets with the nurse, a mother of one of the trapped kids who was captured while looking for her daughter, and asks her to bandage him after one of the kids lit Buddy on fire (this movie is quite gory at some moments).
After she tends to him, Buddy asks for a hug, in which he asks the nurse to hug him harder, before licking her face and grabbing her butt. The nurse pushes Buddy away, before the unicorn irritatingly grabs a fire axe off the wall and storms off to search for the children. This scene is what truly clicked the allegory on my first watch.
I really liked this movie because it was enjoyable while having depth, and Casper Kelly could have easily slapped together a horror Barney with half a plot and characters, but it seemed like he ended up depicting a much larger matter than he might’ve wanted to. I appreciated that factor of Buddy the most.
Aside from that the movie is funny as well. It has ridiculous moments (like Buddy spinning the mailman on his horn after being impaled) or when Buddy gruesomely cuts off part of his body to fit down a well to chase the kids, and he says “Remember what I taught you guys about perseverance?” He has a very goofy and Barney-like voice, so it’s easy to shift tones and have a chuckle at the film. Overall, probably my favorite horror movie this year.
