When I approached the young woman at the box office about buying a ticket for the matinee of Buddy, I did not expect to be told that there was but one ticket left. But that is what happened.
Glad to see a movie that isn't a comic book superhero CGI fest getting some love.
Buddy was a fun, thrilling way to spend an hour and a half. The titular character is an orange furred unicorn host of a kids TV show. Underneath the Mr. Rogers-like sentiments of love and getting along lurks a heart of darkness. We learn that the cheerful host is rather sinister as he kills off the other inhabitants of the idealistic world of anthropomorphized mailboxes, backpacks, couches, etc.
A hug brings the gory episode which saw one kid get impaled against a fence with Buddy's unicorn horn as his three friends flee over a fence and into a forest to a close. We cut to a family with mom, dad, and two sons. One evening at dinner the wife, Grace, looks at the empty chair across the table from her and screams. She has had a brief inkling of a gut feeling that perhaps things are not as they seem. Reminded me of Ragle Gumm's predicament in Time Out of Joint.
Not to be deterred, especially by her highly skeptical husband, Grace pushes deeper into what happened during that episode at dinner. Eventually as she slumbers on the couch, the Buddy show appears on the TV and she gets pulled into the world of the TV program - literally into the TV itself. On the plus side, a Japanese woman with really long hair does not crawl out. Once in the fictional land of Buddy, Grace assumes the role of the nurse, her predecessor having been brutally murdered.
The 3 kids attempt to make their way to Diamond City where they will seek help. Along the way they meet an insalubrious marionette and his human, um, partner. The kids find that the city is something of a chimera. Their long, perilous journey ends with the trio coming up on a model filled with Christmas lights. Buddy is on their trail and he eventually catches up with them. One hug later, the show resets and they're back where they started.
Things go down and the kids effect an escape. The lead kid, Freddy, makes her way to what appears to be a school but finds no one around to help her as Buddy draws ever closer. Instead she finds a room with a couple neural headsets sitting before a TV showing Buddy's show. In another she finds the program being projected onto a large screen across the room from a bank of CRT TVs showing kids of varying ages sitting on couches staring at the camera, presumably their TV sets. They are to be the next children pulled through their boob tubes into Buddy's horrific world.
This ending had a vague Backrooms vibe to it as we get an explanation to events that, in turn, requires an explanation.
When those 3 kids flee, they take with them the friendly Mr. Mailbox who, normally talkative, has been recently silenced by having his door ripped off. Mr. Mailbox was still attached to a post with a pointy end and I kept wondering when someone would get impaled on it.
Buddy was good, bloody, off-kilter fun. I loved that everything was just like the kids' TV shows of old - full of puppets and practical effects. The child actors did really well with only the odd look into the camera. Let us hope that we don't hear that any of them die of an overdose in 20 years.
I came in late and may have missed a trailer or 2. Here are the ones I recall.
This trailer was really annoying and made me want to avoid the movie at all costs.
Then we got one for another video game movie. Oh joy.
Hey! Something I really want to see!
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