Buddy review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.24.26
★★½ 2.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Buddy builds horror out of the bright, synthetic cheerfulness of children’s television, with Keegan-Michael Key as an oversized TV character whose friendliness already feels faintly threatening. The premise is clever and the world has an intriguing internal logic, but the movie reveals its hand early and then keeps playing the same card. What might have made an excellent 45-minute episode becomes increasingly tedious at feature length. There are worthwhile ideas and effective moments here; there simply is not enough story to support ninety minutes, and a horror movie should not leave me fighting sleep.
Full review — contains spoilers
This is a horror movie built around a creepy children’s-show vibe. Keegan-Michael Key plays Buddy, this giant children’s television character, and the whole thing uses that bright, happy, slightly creepy kids-show energy as the foundation for the horror.
I initially thought Black Mirror while I was watching it, although I’m not even sure Black Mirror is the right comparison. Everybody here accepts the basic rules of the world they’re in, and once you understand the structure of the movie, it’s actually a pretty straightforward horror film.
The premise is interesting. I got what they were doing. The problem is that I got it pretty early. And then they kept doing it.
There are twists and different things happening, but some of it just kept going longer than I thought the script itself justified. At some point, it stopped being interesting and started becoming tedious.
Honestly, I think this would have worked better as something like a web series or a long episode of television. Give me about 40 or 50 minutes with this premise and I probably would have enjoyed it more. Spending an hour and a half with it was just too much.
The obvious problem is that you can’t really put a 45-minute movie into theaters. So maybe this simply wasn’t the right format for the idea.
I don’t dislike Buddy. There are interesting things here. I thought it was okay. But by the end, I was getting tired and getting close to nodding off, and that’s really not where you want me during your horror movie.
It’s mediocre to me mostly because of the length. There just wasn’t enough premise here to support the amount of movie they made out of