"Buddy": A homicidal unicorn and two queer-coded kids, but is there any buddy-bonding? With Topher Grace, Michael Shannon, and Sergey

 

I was interested in seeing Buddy (2026), a horror parody of 1980s-1990s children's shows like Barney the Dinosaur  and Pee-Wee's Playhouse,featuring a homicidal anthropomorphic unicorn (voiced by Keegan Michael Key, with Sergey Zhuravsky, left, inside the suit).

I was a Pee-Wee fan back in the day, and it stars Luke Speakman (below) and Tristan Borders, child actors with a lot of gay-positive work.  Maybe there will be some queer codes, or at least some buddy bonding.  But after reading a plot synopsis, I'm going to give it a miss.  Here's why.

Spoiler alert: I go through the whole movie.

In the first scenes, the children's show It's Buddy features the Unicorn and his four child pals: Josh, Wade, Oliver, and Freddy (a girl). Three boys -- ample buddy bonding opportunities.

Then Josh (Luke Speakman) rebels, preferring to read his book rather than going to a dance party.  Buddy kills him, says that he's off on a journey to Diamond City, and replaces him with Hannah. But Freddy finds his blood-stained book in the trash and gets suspicious.  She tells her friend Wade that something is wrong.  A boy-girl dyad.

The new line-up is Freddy, Wade, Oliver, and Hannah.  Two boys, with buddy bonding possible, except that Wade already has a girlfriend. 

Freddy and Wade ask Nurse Nancy to talk to Buddy.  He kills her.

Maybe they could run away to Diamond City?   The kids try to escape in a sentient train named Charlie, but Buddy kills him, and the only other adult character, Mailman Miles.

Then Buddy starts cutting  Wade (Caleb Williams).  Freddy sees her chance and sets the unicorn on fire, but he doesn't die, he just becomes partially melted.  He kills Wade, leaving:

Freddy, Oliver, and Hannah. One boy, two girls.  No buddy-bonding potential left.

 They try to escape with Mr. Mailbox, but Buddy kills him.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Grace hires a psychic to contac the spirit in their house. She has a husband, Ben (Topher Grace, left) , and two sons, Derek and Timothy (Seamus Flynn, Bryson JonSteele, below). 

More after the break

Airplane!: Convincing Bob that "Surely you can't be serious!" is funny

For Thanksgiving this year, Bob cooked a turkey -- but I couldn't get him out of bed until 9:00, so the turkey went into the oven at 11:00, and we didn't eat until 6:00 pm.  We passed the time by watching "Thanksgiving" movies, such as Airplane! (1980).

A parody of 1970s disaster movies like the Airport series (1970, 1976, 1977, 1979), it holds up surprisingly well -- for me, anyway.  Probably because there is a real plot, with characterization and suspense: when the cockpit crew and many of the passengers are disabled with food poisoning, traumatized pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays), who hasn't been able to fly since the War, is forced to land the plane.

Many of the jokes still made me laugh, although Bob was annoyed by my habit of laughing before the punchline: 

"Surely you can't be serious!"

"I am serious, and don't call me Shirley!"

"The hospital called."

"The hospital!  What is it?"

"It's a big building with patients in it, but that's not important now."

Other jokes were still funny to me, but I had to explain them to Bob, who wasn't born yet in 1980:

The stewardess gives a passenger a second cup of coffee, and his wife muses "He never asks for a second cup of coffee at home": a popular tv commercial.

Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer: a parody of his 1970s tough-guy roles.

An elderly white woman can "speak jive" to communicate with black passengers: she was Barbera Billingsley, the button-down conservative Mom on Leave It to Beaver.  Interestingly the team of Abrams, Zucker, and Zuker was also responsible for Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch-parody movie starring both Wally and the Beaver.

Bob had never hears of any o fhtem.

Other jokes made him glare at me and say "You liked this?"

Racist jokes are everywhere.

1. The two black guys speaking jive, with subtitles translating into English.

2.  A isolated African tribe who "have never seen white people before" are instinctively good at basketball.

3. Striker's life history is so boring that everyone he tells it to tries to kill themselves: a Japanese guy commits seppuku, and an Indian guy tries self-immolation.

4. We could do without Captain Oveur's pedophilia jokes: "Billy, have you ever seen a grown man naked?  Do you like gladiator movies?"

5. Striker sees his future girlfriend Elaine for the first time in a sleazy bar during the War.  He is so oeverwhelmed by her beauty that he thinks he is dreaming, and asks the guy sitting next to him to "pinch me."  The guy glares and moves away. thinking that he is gay.

6.  We were torn about the character of Johnny, who seems to be an assistant ("How about some coffee?"  "No, thank you"), but is listed in the credits as Air Traffic Controller Johnny Henshaw-Jacobs.  Sometimes he evokes gay stereotypes: he criticizes a woman's outfit, respnds to "What do you make of this?" with "Oh, I could make a lovely hat," and calls his Auntie Em during the crisis like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  

But at other times he comes across as just wacko.  While the plane is landing, he umplugs the lights on the runway, then says "Just kidding" and laughs maniacally.

Compared to the uber-swishy gay characters of other movies of the era, such as Lamar in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), we see a much more nuanced performance.  We wondered if the actor tweaked his performance to cut down on the swish: Stephen Stucker was something of an activist.  He was one of the first performers to publicly announce that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, a  few months before his death in 1986.

Verdict:  Me, A-.  Bob: C.  I guess you had to be there. 

"The Final Girls": Psycho-slasher parody with two queer characters and some beefcake.

 

In The Final Girls (2015), not to be confused with Final Girl (2015), actress Amanda and her daughter Max are driving home from an audition that she bombed.  She complains that she is typecast as a "scream queen" due to a role in the famous psycho-slasher movie, Camp Bloodbath, back in the 1980s.  She was the Final Girl, the one who didn't have sex, and therefore got to live.  

But not in real life: at that moment, they get into a car crash.  Mom dies!  

 Three years later, Max is in college, studying with her Love Interest Chris (Alexander Ludwig, left) and a couple of female friends, when horror fan Duncan (Thomas Middleditch) talks them into going to a midnight showing of the movie and its sequel.

Remember, Max is still mourning her mother.  Why go to a movie where a psycho-slasher is trying to kill a younger version of her?

Suddenly, zap!  They are trapped in the movie...and the psycho-slasher is stalking them, too!  They have to use their wits and knowledge of the genre to defeat him.

The first character they meet is Kurt (Adam Devine, right), an obnoxious jock.  He is also apparently bisexual -- he hits on boys and girls both, and thinks that gays "have a cool lifestyle."  Interestingly, instead of a homophobic slur, he tells Chris to "suck a turd." 

Like most psycho-slashers in the movies of the 1980s, Billy (Daniel Norris) targets teenagers having sex, so so when Kurt strips down to his bulge while his girlfriend waits in the next room, Love Interest Chris rushes in to distract him.  Try showing him your dick -- oh, wait, the killer is attracted to gay sex, too.

The other queer character is Blake (Tory N. Thompson), who also black.  You know what happens to the black guy in psycho-slasher movies, right? Gulp! 

Next the visitors from our universe try warning the characters about the psycho-slasher.  Remember, Max is interacting with the movie version of her own mother, so she'd rather not see her skewered.

The plan backfires: everyone runs away screaming.  

Kurt and his girlfriend try to drive away, but they hit a totem pole and die (Kurt is pretzeled).   But in the original movie, they survived!  The intruders have tampered with the plot, and now all the rules are off.  No one will survive.

Well, some survive.  You'll have to watch the movie to find out who. 

Beefcake: Adam in his underwear.  He is contractually obligated to show his dick in every movie appearance.

Heterosexism: No one actually has sex, for obvious reasons. Some girl boobs.

Queer Characters: Kurt and Blake,  through queer codes instead of self-identification.  But this is supposed to be the 1980s, when you were lucky to get that much representation.  Writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller are a gay couple, and speaking to their own experiences as horror fans.  

My grade: A-

There are some bulge and frontal nude pictures in the NSFW version of this review.