I saw this film on streaming a month or so after it released in theaters. I had initially expected to see it as intended, but I was grounded at the time for God knows why.

Recap

The film is about a group of children in a TV show called “It’s Buddy”, a stereotypical early 2000s kids’ show aimed at teaching children valuable life lessons. It seems most similar to Barney the Dinosaur. However, if a child acts up, Buddy murders them. Oh my goodness, how scary! Buddy doesn’t seem to be an in-univserse show, it’s more of a seperate dimension from reality which is only viewable at certain times when the show has an absence needing filled, where it drags people into the screen. This seemingly erases most of them from the real world as if they never existed, though this is flawed because Grace, the mother of a child on the show Freddy, feels like her and her husband had a third child.

Here’s a run-down of the plot: Buddy kills a kid, the other kids find out and run away, more kids die, Grace arrives in the Budrooms, and sacrifices herself to let the kids escape down a well, where Freddy kills Buddy and escapes through a TV screen back to the real world.

I can’t be bothered to explain it in more detail because honestly it brought up more questions than it answered.

Thoughts

Some of said questions include: What is the nature of the show? What is its relation with reality? What happened to the other two unicorns painted on a mural along with Buddy? Why is there a monitoring station? Why is there a school building underground? Why do all the nonhuman characters remember Diamond City as if it was real? Why does Buddy turn into a Kaiju? Who’s the guy designing all the nonhuman characters? What’s the point of it all? The show does not exist in-universe.

Most of these come up in the last 30 minutes, probably for “hype and aura moments”. It also wasn’t really that scary. I understand it’s new seeing kids die in a horror movie, but for me at least that doesn’t make it any more thrilling. It was okay, I guess. They really nailed the set design and 2000s aesthetics. I think the cast was great, especially Keegan-Michael Key as Buddy. I really don’t have much more to say.