Review: It's playtime, kids, but don't even think of escaping 'Buddy,' a twisted faux-90s artifact

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Set us as preferred Did anyone ever trust that purple dinosaur? A curdled mug of nostalgia for adult-size puppets leading children around candy-hued soundstage sets, “Buddy” is a horror comedy scraped from the fuzzy lining of low-rent kiddie programming.Director Casper Kelly, a graduate of Adult Swim’s warped late-night gewgaws (“Too Many Cooks”) who wrote this movie with Jamie King, drops us right into a classically ’90s-era moppet time-waster.The titular orange unicorn (voiced to maximum adenoidal effect by Keegan-Michael Key) is both master of playtime for a quartet of boys and girls and a font of wisdom (“You gotta be scared to be brave!”), usually expressed in insipid songs and accompanied by elementary dance moves.

Thanks to the rigorously retro-cheap aesthetics of the film’s crack design team (production designer Anna Kathleen, costume designer Shawna-Nova Foley and puppet creator Devon Hawkes Ludlow), your memories of being tube-babysat will be triggered.Credits roll and a new episode starts, but is this show business or a contained world? That proves to be a complicated question when one surly boy’s disappearance after refusing to play along with Buddy leads a suspicious Freddy (Delaney Quinn) and her friend Wade (Caleb Williams) to wonder if all is not right with their large furry guardian, who seems genuinely disturbed by defiance or lack of affection.(“Is he sick?” “Yes, but not like a cold — in the head!”) When they witness Buddy outright murdering cheery Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki), suddenly the notion of escaping to the whispered-about metropolis known as Diamond City sounds like a necessity.

Movies His 2014 earworm ‘Too Many Cooks’ defined a trajectory that’s become fashionable.The Adult Swim veteran now has his first theatrical release, ‘Buddy.’ Once outside the walls of Buddyland and into the surrounding wilderness, Kelly shifts from boxy TV framing a...