Plot: A shy college student and his reckless roommate set out on a simple mission to grab pizza, but after a strange dose of a mind-bending experimental drug, they’re thrust into a chaotic night of absurd encounters, wild hallucinations, and unexpected revelations that could change their lives forever.
Review: The last memorable stoner comedy was Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle and its multiple sequels. The genre has not been kept up as consistently as it was back in the 1980s, but every now and then, we get a nice reminder that drugs can be funny. Well, as long as it isn’t heroin or meth. The new indie film Pizza Movie hails from internet comedy duo BriTANicK (Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher), who take on the college-comedy genre by injecting it with Gen Z energy and a lot of concepts. It is an overwhelming mix of hallucinations, body-swapping, and time travel to tell a story about good friends and the importance of being true to yourself. Starring Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone, and Lulu Wilson, Pizza Movie is one of the weirder movies coming out of SXSW this year, before it hits Hulu in a couple of weeks.
Pizza Movie follows college roommates Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) and Jack (Gaten Matarazzo). Montgomery has a crush on Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and is struggling to have enough confidence to ask her out. Jack is hated by the entire school for getting their football team kicked out. The nerdy roommates just want to have a fun Friday night full of drinking and games, but it is ruined by bully Logan (Marcus Scribner) and his cronies, who have made it a regular habit to fart in the faces of their prey. Montgomery and Jack’s friend, Lizzy (Lulu Wilson), has started hanging out with Logan’s crew and ditched her fellow nerds, leaving a rift between them. When Montgomery and Jack discover a tin of pills left by the room’s former resident, chemistry student Frankie (Sarah Sherman). As the drug kicks in, Jack and Montgomery are subjected to six distinct phases that can only be mitigated if they can get to the pizza they just had delivered. What follows is an odyssey that takes them from the top floor of their dorm to the lobby and so many more places in between.
At a quick ninety-two minutes, Pizza Movie goes everywhere you could imagine and places I never expected. Once the drugs are in effect, Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone are hilarious at contending with hallucinations that include a weird pink octopus, a Venezuelan James Bond, a creepy Pinocchio man, and the most exploding heads you could fix into a five-minute scene. The drug, known as M.I.N.T.S., has very specific rules that make for some very funny moments. I found myself laughing out loud multiple times through Pizza Movie, but almost exclusively at things related to Jack, Montgomery, and anyone else under the effect of the pills. There is also a plot involving the resident advisors, led by Blake (Jack Martin), that combines elements of The Dark Knight and The Lord of the Rings in a way I never thought I would see on screen. To say Pizza Movie is stupid is a disservice to the silly brand of vulgarity on display that is right at home alongside iconic stoners like The Dude, Jeff Spicoli, and Cheech & Chong.
The closest duo Jack and Montgomery resemble is Harold and Kumar, with surreal dream sequences similar in both movies. Pizza Movie definitely follows a more Gen Z mentality, with the protagonists living in a very different world than the one the movie stoners mentioned earlier. Gaten Matarrazo is not far off from playing Jack as a modern variation on Dustin from Stranger Things, but his personality comes through much more naturally here. Sean Giambrone, best known for his extensive voice work in animated films and shows, has some standout moments here as he deals with his crush as well as when interacting with his pet butterfly, Lysander. Lulu Wilson has fun as Lizzy, playing a very different character from the one we saw in her Becky movies. There are some fun supporting turns in the movie from comedian Caleb Hearon as new RA Sidney and Justin Cooley as Byron.
Writer/director duo Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, known on the internet as BriTANick, have been making sketch comedy for years, building a large YouTube fanbase and a brief tenure writing for Saturday Night Live. The pair also wrote the upcoming Jorma Taccone movie Over Your Dead Body, starring Jason Segel and Samara Weaving, but Pizza Movie is right in their wheelhouse. if you have seen their sketches online, you have a good idea what you are in for with this movie. Pizza Movie has more slapstick violence and profanity than anything else, focusing on making the funny moments as bizarre and surreal as possible, and a wild meta-joke in the final scenes that would be right at home in a Monty Python or Kids in the Hall movie. It is appropriate that Pizza Movie is making its debut at SXSW, the perfect forum for a ridiculous comedy like this. Because it is a low-budget independent movie, Pizza Movie benefits from the name recognition Gaten Matarazzo brings to the project.
Pizza Movie is too dumb to be great but is also too fun to be bad. It falls somewhere in the middle and will likely be the perfect movie to throw on in college dorm rooms around the country. I don’t foresee Montgomery and Jack turning into the stars of an ongoing franchise, but I had enough fun with the moments in this movie to give it another watch. McElhaney and Kocher packed a lot of material into Pizza Movie, which gives it a bit of an uneven tone. It shifts from funny to bizarre and back again, with many moments either undeveloped or wasted. As sketch comedy writers, there is some brilliance hidden within Pizza Movie, but it lacks an overall structure to let it work as well as it could have. I enjoyed Pizza Movie, but I think it works better as a series of moments rather than as a feature film. I know several scenes I will definitely watch again and again, and that makes this at least a moderate success from a pair of up-and-coming filmmaking talents. This is a movie designed to be enjoyed with a pizza and your mind-altering substance of choice.
Pizza Movie premieres on Hulu on April 3rd.
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Source:
JoBlo.com