Our Paul Gratton takes a look at the new horror movie BUDDY that seems to have quite a few wacky twists & turns up its sleeve! Read on for more.
There is a strain running through contemporary horror films that seems to take particular pleasure in skewering sacred childhood icons and turning them into murderous psychos. It is a simple joke, one that gets tired awfully quick. Buddy is much better made than its contemporaries such as Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey; Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare; Pinocchio: Unhinged; or Bambi: The Reckoning. There was even a Mickey Mouse slasher rushed into production on the day Mickey fell into public domain. It was called Screamboat, and featured David Howard Thornton,(who played the killer clown in Terrifier) as a killer mouse called Screamboat Willie. These are execrable low budget exploitation films, but I’m not sure that Buddy has very much more on its mind, despite a higher budget and catchy children’s singalong songs. It seems to be going after Barney and Friends, as a big plush host of a children’s show loses his marbles and starts eliminating those who oppose or question his passive-aggressive child support tactics as deployed within a daytime television series aimed at preschoolers. The show’s theme song may be catchy and comforting, but Buddy does not handle any deviation from his rose-coloured world view very well. One can imagine this film working best at midnight screenings, where audiences would probably have great fun yelling at the screen in post-ironic support for Buddy’s increasingly gory settling of accounts. Indeed, it premiered at midnight in Sundance and went on to play at SXSW where this would have played well. But ultimately Buddy becomes more of a sick joke for people who like tearing down sacred cows (or is Buddy a bear?) than a horror film that is even remotely frightening.
Rating: 4 out of 10
