I never watched “Barney & Friends”. You know, the once wildly popular children’s television show about the talking purple Tyrannosaurus Rex who would sing and dance with his dino buddies to the delight of kids all around the world. I had well outgrown it when it first launched in 1992 and thankfully my kids never caught onto it in the mid-2000s. But we all knew who Barney was. How could you miss him? He was everywhere.

While “Barney” was beloved by many children, he became a punchline for many adults. And he’s clearly the template for the wickedly fun horror-comedy “Buddy”. Directed by Casper Kelly, this hilariously unhinged movie takes what has long passed for children’s entertainment and turns it on its head. It’s an extremely hard movie to describe in large part due to its combined absurdity and audacity. Just know that it is a bizarrely entertaining film in the “I can’t believe they’re doing this” kind of way.

“Buddy” can best be described as a satirical black comedy and supernatural slasher sandwich. Kelly fuses those elements together in some weird and wild ways, resulting in a movie that on the surface could easily be dismissed as some ludicrous cash-in. But this is no “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” or “Popeye the Slayer Man”. In reality, it’s a far more sophisticated subversion of the synthetically happy and overtly wholesome children’s media than its schlocky B-movie facade might have you believe.

It’s hard to believe such a scattershot mash-up would work at all, but somehow “Buddy” does. It kicks off by playing like a Barney spoof, where we watch three back-to-back-to-back episodes of the children’s educational television show “It’s Buddy”. The production design in ridiculously well done, fully and authentically capturing the retro tv aesthetic. It’s all there – the overly bright color tones, the intentionally artificial sets, and the anthropomorphic objects that populate them – a sofa, a mailbox, a backpack, etc.

It all centers around the show’s star, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key), an oversized orange unicorn with yellow trim and a big purple heart on his chest. Buddy surrounds himself by four devoted children who exhibit the same zombie-like adoration as in the Barney shows. And there are a handful of other simple-minded characters who pop up from time to time – Mailman Miles (Bennie Taylor), Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki), and so on. It’s a spot-on representation, right down to the smallest detail.

By the second episode, we start to notice that something is off. It begins when one of the kids, Josh (Luke Speakman) doesn’t want to dance, much to Buddy’s chagrin. Josh suddenly disappears and is replaced by a new cast member named Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan). But suspicions rise among Josh’s castmates, Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Wade (Caleb Williams), and Oliver (Tristan Broders). And the more the dig for information about their missing friend, the more they learn Buddy isn’t just a little shady. He’s full-on deranged.

Meanwhile in what resembles our real world, Grace (Cristin Milioti), her husband Ben (Topher Grace) , and their two sons Derek (Bryson JonSteele) and Timothy (Seamus Flynn) live a routine suburban life. But after seeing a vision of the “It’s Buddy” show, Grace begins having overwhelming feelings that she and Ben once had a third child. No matter how hard she tries, she finds no hard evidence that she had a third child. And her research turns up no record of Buddy’s show ever existing.

These two seemingly contradictory worlds inevitably collide in a way that never makes much sense. The story takes us from point to point in a competent enough way. But while the pieces connect on a base level, the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the world are mostly tossed aside. It inevitably leads to an ending with a ton of unanswered questions that the movie makes no attempt at answering. But that’s hardly a deal-breaker in a movie this hysterically outrageous.

As “Buddy” is steadily subverting expectations, it takes a scalpel to the to the children’s television culture of the 1990s. At the same time it is every bit as bizarre as it sounds. Kelly goes all-in with the goofiness and the gore, leaving us laughing out loud one minute and grimacing the next. There are some genuinely good laughs amid the blood-shedding, and some borderline shocking kills amid the layers of absurdity. Again, it shouldn’t work at all, but Kelly pulls it off. And even the glaring questions left by the clunky open ending don’t completely derail his audacious debut feature.

VERDICT – 3 STARS