Roadside AttractionsRemember Buddy, the friendly orange unicorn created to teach kids about right and wrong, sharing, and caring? Casper Kelly’s feature debut, so named for its mascot, doesn’t actually expect you to (Buddy is fictional, after all), but it helps to be familiar with the kids’ shows that Buddy is so eagerly skewering here.Kelly is best known for his tenure with Adult Swim, directing shorts disguised as sitcom openings or infomercials that, if you woke up in the middle of the night and caught them on TV — as many a Millennial did — you’d think you were losing your mind. Buddy’s strongest moments follow that brief to the letter: the film reads as a few lost episodes of Barney & Friends twisted into a bloody fever dream. The bulk of Kelly’s debut takes place within the fictional realm of It’s Buddy!, where the eponymous unicorn (voiced capably by Keegan-Michael Key), a handful of mascots and animated objects, and a cast of sweet kids live in perfect episodic harmony. That is, until Buddy’s “aww shucks” placidity gives way to a brittle temper, sparking explosive, violent acts that occur just off-screen and will undoubtedly trigger a “WTF?!” from a rowdy audience. (If you’re lucky enough to catch this in theaters.)Buddy’s outbursts, and the gaslighting that comes after, strike a tonal balance that’s been sorely lacking in the year’s scarier offerings. Buddy finds an unrelenting rhythm as each “episode” comes to an end — punctuated by its own version of Barney’s “I Love You” and a tease of Buddy’s insidious side — only to be followed by another adventure more bizarre than the last. The best part about Buddy is, like Kelly’s viral short, Too Many Cooks, there’s no way to predict what’s next. That zany blessing can also sometimes be a curse, especially when it betrays the film’s inconsistencies, but this fluorescent nightmare gets a gold star for juggling humor, horror, and heart.At just 95 minutes, Buddy is brisk, but otherwise pretty ambitious. Kelly and his co-writer, Jamie King, have clearly thought a lot about this world, and their script drops enough lore to fill a real TV show to the brim. Our cast of kids seems to exist only on the set of It’s Buddy! — there’s no cameraman to yell “cut” at the end of each episode, nor do they get to go home. No one remembers their lives or their families. There’s only Buddy, his strange candy-colored realm populated with talking flowers and mailboxes, and the love and friendship that seemingly keeps it all running. Buddy’s laugh-out-loud plotting is tempered by a gorgeous production. | Roadside AttractionsHad Buddy focused solely on the deconstruction of a kids’ TV show, it’d have been a solid effort. It’d also be a safe one, and this film isn’t content to simply stitch together a few episodes of a fake series, brilliantly bonkers as those episodes are. It’s also focusing on the trippy methods Buddy uses to lure kids from the real world and into his, which we witness when Buddy yanks us out of the TV world and plops us back into reality. Stay-at-home-mom Grace (Cristin Milioti) is convinced that something in her humdrum life just isn’t quite right. It has a lot to do with this sense of absence — an empty chair at the dining room table, the decal on the back of her car that features stick figure versions of her family — and Buddy might be responsible for it. Through Grace, and her bonds with her husband (a brilliantly over-it Topher Grace) and kids, Buddy is scratching at the questions many ‘90s kids and their guardians have toyed with in the years since. Were shows like Barney or Teletubbies more than the sum of their creepy parts? Were parents right to park their kids in front of the TV and allow these “educational” shows to babysit them? Were the mascots we grew up watching just perverts in fur suits? Buddy makes a tentative case for the latter, but its thesis on this phenomenon as a whole lacks the strong focus that Kelly brings to other aspects of the film. Kelly wants the best of both worlds, but Buddy runs into problems when those realms collide. | Roadside AttractionsBuddy is constantly hilarious, scary, and ingeniously shot, but its tone is nowhere near as consistent. Sometimes it’s all an extended metaphor for how weird the world can be for kids, gesturing as much to Barney or Five Nights at Freddy’s as it is to the behind-the-scenes horrors of The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes it’s a fantasy-horror romp that’s writing the rules of its reality as it goes. Buddy is almost undone by its reluctance to commit to one or the other — that, and its last-minute lore dumps. Like Too Many Cooks, this story unravels like one long, dark improv game, with each nihilistic twist “yes and”-ing the last. Unlike that short, though, its search for meaning comes just a little too late. Its final gut punch dredges up more questions than answers, nearly undercutting brilliant turns from Key and Milioti. Buddy’s success will depend entirely on one’s bandwidth for BS. All told, though, it’s a valiant effort from Kelly, even if this film might have worked a tad better as a short.Buddy opens in theaters on August 28.