“Buddy” looks like childhood TV got dragged through a meat grinder

A teaser for “Buddy” dropped on July 9, giving people their first proper look at Casper Kelly’s new film before its September 4 theatrical release. The movie stars Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt, and Clint Howard.

The premise is filthy in exactly the right way. Inside a children’s television show called “It’s Buddy!”, a group of amnesiac kids live under the control of a tyrannical orange unicorn host named Buddy. Once the children start pushing back and one of them disappears, the whole setup turns into nightmare material, with the real world pulled into the mess through a traumatized suburban mother named Grace.

Casper Kelly is already wired for this sort of thing. His work has never been shy about taking bright, familiar, supposedly harmless imagery and twisting it into something deranged. A movie built around poisoned kiddie-show nostalgia is very much in his lane, and the cast is weird enough to make the whole thing even more attractive to horror fans who like their genre a little unhinged.

Now that the teaser is out, “Buddy” has crossed the line from intriguing title to actual object of curiosity. That first look did its job. It made the movie feel dangerous, ridiculous, and just specific enough to stick in your head for the next two months.