Buddy marks the feature debut of writer-director Casper Kelly, who created a stir back in 2014 with Too Many Cooks, a horror-comedy short that he made for Adult Swim that started off as a spoof of the opening credits of a blandly cheerful 90s-era family sitcom before slowly transmogrifying into something weirder and decidedly gorier. Even if one didn’t recognize the name, anyone who saw that short would clearly sense some kind of connection between the two projects. The title refers to Buddy the Unicorn (Keegan-Michael Key, sort of), the relentlessly cheery star of a 90s-vintage children’s show that finds him bouncing around an overly bright park surrounded by anthropomorphized objects at every turn and a group of adoring young children whom he teaches valuable lessons about life, often via song. Essentially, Buddy is a seemingly benevolent god in this world and, like most seemingly benevolent gods, he isn’t big on being challenged and when one of his charges decides one day that he would rather read by himself than show Buddy some cool dance moves, Buddy doesn’t take it particularly well and the recalcitrant one suddenly disappears, leaving behind only the book, now covered with something that might not actually be red paint. Another kid, Freddy (Delaney Quinn), begins to suspect that something is terribly wrong with Buddy and when her suspicions are gruesomely confirmed, she and two other youngster—Oliver (Tristan Broder) and new replacement Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan) hop the fence in an attempt to reach the safety of Diamond City—a journey that allows them to encounter characters portrayed by the likes of Cristina Milioti, Clint Howard, Patton Oswald and Michael Shannon—with the badly wounded and now completely homicidal Buddy determined to find them and set things back to how they used to be—by hugging them and singing the insipid closing song, he is able to end each “episode” and start anew with his powers fully restored.
At first glance, Buddy may seem to have the kind of one-joke premise—Barney with an axe—that could easily wear out its welcome when stretched out to feature length, (Even Too Many Cooks went on a bit too long for its own good and that only clocked in at 11 minutes.) That is why I was a bit resistant about seeing it ever since first hearing about it after its debut at Sundance this year but it turns out that Kelly has figured out enough inventive additions to the basic idea to allow it to pretty much sustain itself for the duration. One of the most clever is the choice to set the film entirely (save for one key sequence) within the universe of the Buddy show, allowing Kelly to have a lot of fun as he both recreates the loopy Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-on-a-budget aesthetic of those shows and has a lot of fun exploiting those peculiar details to comedic effect, such as the realization that it can be hard to pull off a killing unseen in a place where every ordinarily inanimate object has eyes and can talk. Although the film, while certainly gory enough, is not particularly scary (although those who grew up watching the kind of shows that are being riffed on here might feel a bit differently), it does give viewers a lot of laughs, a few reasonably head-spinning moments of pure strangeness and, perhaps most shockingly, a group of kids who are likable and charming enough so that you actually find yourself hoping that they will somehow survive Buddy’s wrath instead of rooting for them to be chopped up into hamburger. Buddy is probably too unrelentingly strange to appeal to a lot of moviegoers but those with a taste for the outré—particularly those who have always sensed a certain unspoken malevolence in the forced cheeriness found in many icons of toddlers—may want to give it a look. Just don’t bring the kids
.One of the more interesting entries in the glut of zombie-related entertainment that have turned up in the last decade or so was Train to Busan, Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho’s inventive and relentlessly kinetic take on the genre in a number of survivors of a zombie outbreak tried to survive a trip on a high-speed train in which a number of the passengers inside began turning into monsters themselves. Although not technically a sequel, his latest film, Colony, more or less takes the basic conceit of that earlier effort and shifts the playing field from the vertical to the horizontal by placing much of the action in a high-rise building housing everything from offices to a full shopping mall. As the story begins, a bioengineering conference is being held that is hosted by a celebrated industry CEO (Kim Jong-Tae) as well as Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-whan), a disgruntled former employee with a needle full of a home brewed virus that turns those exposed into zombies. One stab later and the building is soon overrun with the creatures, who we soon discover somehow have some kind of hive mind that allows them to move together in tandem, as well as a handful of uninfected types, led by unemployed academic Keon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), try to avoid the monsters while a group of scientists and military types dither outside as to how to stop things without killing Seo, who claims to have the only vaccine for the virus inside his own body.
Colony marks Yeon’s third zombie epic (there was also Peninsula, a semi-sequel to Train to Busan in which a group of thieves snuck into a quarantined area in order to steal millions of dollars that were left behind in the evacuation) and in many ways, it is the least of the bunch. He is clearly following the Train to Busan template here throughout, juggling a number of characters dealing with their personal issues in between, and occasionally during, the waves of zombie attack. The difference is that while the characters in Train to Busan were fleshed out to such a degree that you actually cared about the people getting chomped up, the ones on display here are far more formulaic—aside from Keon, who has a complicated backstory that does come into play, the uninfected people here are largely forgettable. As for the story, it is not particularly fresh either, though I do have to give Yeon at least some credit for having the sheer audacity to set a good chunk of a zombie epic inside of a shopping mall. He does figure out a way of doing something interesting with the zombies—although the concept of a swarm of creatures moving more or less as one via a shared consciousness is not in itself new, he stages their movements in a way that suggests a more-terrifying-than-normal flash mob and is both funny and kind of freaky. Aside from that twist, however, Colony is nothing more than a standard-issue zombie saga that, despite being made with a certain degree of style and plenty of gore, is nothing that you haven’t seen before
.At the start of the boisterous new Australian musical-comedy The Deb, the directorial debut of actress big-city girl Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes), a budding activist who declares, in all seriousness, that “I think I might be the feminist voice of my generation,” has just led a protest at her fancy private school—a fully choreographed one set to a tune called “FML” that probably won’t make the TV edit—that has resulted in her expulsion. At her wit’s end, Maeve’s mother comes up with a particularly diabolical punishment by shipping her off to the outback town of Dunburn to live with her uncle (Shane Jacobson), who is both a farmer and the local mayor, and awkward cousin Taylah (Natalie Abbott), a good-natured social reject who is relentlessly teased by the Pixie Cups, a trio of Mean Sheilas consisting of Danielle (Brianna Bishop), Chantelle (Karis Oka) and leader Annabelle (Stevie Jean). Although appalled by her current circumstances and keen to exploit them via a snarky podcast, Maeve is good enough to instinctively become protective of her cousin and is determined to find her a date for the upcoming Dunburn Debutante Ball, an annual affair where the girls ask the boys out. Complications ensue—some pleasant, such as the presence of handsome lad Dusty (Costa D’Angelo), and some not so pleasant, particularly the machinations of Annabelle’s mother Janette (Wilson), who runs the local salon fancies herself as the town’s queen bee (her claim to fame is having supposedly given Hugh Jackman her specialty wax and has the swatch i of hair to prove it) and is determined to take down the newcomer and run her out of town.
The Deb is a film that was made in 2024 and has been mired in controversy since it debuted at that year’s Toronto Film Festival as the result of highly publicized disputes between Wilson and both the producers and MacInnes, which might explain why it is only now turning up in theaters with little in the way of advance word. This is kind of a shame because while it is anything but perfect, the film does have a loopy charm to it that deserves to be seen. The screenplay by Helen Reilly (based on her stage musical) has too many characters, too many redemption arcs and too many plot threads that don’t quite add up (particularly the inevitable but when Maeve and Taylah seemingly unbreakable friendship is threatened by Janette’s deviousness) and too many of the songs—and there are a lot of them—sound alike to the point where they begin to blend together. However, when the film focuses on its central relationship between Maeve and Taylah, it really starts to click (MacInnes and Abbott are both quite winning throughout) and Wilson more or less steals her own movie with her undeniably broad but very funny turn as Janette. As a director, Wilson does show promise and to her credit, she has elected to start out with a technically complicated project featuring any number of big musical numbers, all of which are staged with flair and energy. Essentially suggesting what Muriel’s Wedding might have been like had it been put into the hands of John Waters, The Deb juggles outrageous humor with enough actual sincerity so that you find yourself laughing with the characters instead of simply laughing at their oddness and the result is a lot of cheerful fun that I suspect will become a cult favorite in the years to come.