Directed by Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher — Screenplay by Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher.
Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher’s Pizza Movie is a modern stoner comedy that follows Montgomery (played by Sean Giambrone) and Jack (played by Gaten Matarazzo), two college roommates, who find this special drug after it falls out of their ceiling boards. The drug is called ‘M.I.N.T.S.’ but is nothing like mints. It is a hallucinogenic drug that takes them through multiple reality-breaking phases. To avoid a nightmarish final phase, the boys need to eat some pizza before they reach it, but their pizza journey will lead them directly into confrontation with an old friend (Lizzy, played by Lulu Wilson), bullies, extreme RAs (led by Jack Martin’s character, Blake), and the girl (Ashley, played by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) that Montgomery has a massive crush on.
This is the feature directorial debut of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, who are better known as the internet sketch comedy duo BriTANicK. Their film tries to be as youthful as their internet reputation may make them seem to a much older generation. Pizza Movie borrows heavily from a variety of films and filmmakers, but despite that, the final product is quite charming. The essential drug premise, split into distinct phases, feels like it is directly inspired by a popular sequence in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 21 Jump Street, and the zippy, over-the-top pacing and visual style feel like something belonging in an Edgar Wright film. To add to that, the characters, arcs, and formula feel founded in classic cliches and tropes. This feels like an attempt to make a trippy clone of a wide variety of films, but one that owes a lot to stuff like Superbad, in addition to what has already been mentioned. One of the most successful elements of the film is how its drug phases allow the film to play around with different surreal comedy formulas, whether that be a time-travel movie or a Freaky Friday-type body swap film.
Although what holds this back is mainly the obviousness of its well-worn cliches (and, for me, a score that, in the first scenes, did too much), the comedy was all around very successful for me. Not everything lands well, as it very much has this ‘throwing everything at the wall’ feel (although it is, sort of the point, that the jocky, popular kids who fart in the main character’s faces are juvenile, that type of juvenile humor made me lose some interest in that moment), so much of it did work, with the zany moments of severe surrealism hitting perfectly. There is a great fourth-wall-breaking scene late in the film, there’s this red animated character that pops up out of nowhere, and there’s one sequence where their heads explode with splatter-like blood effects whenever they swear. All of this made me laugh out loud. I also really enjoyed the obvious Inglourious Basterds reference led by Jack Martin’s character.
Even though they play caricatures or cliche-ridden characters, I thought the young cast was absolutely terrific. Sean Giambrone, who, it seems, is best known for voice work, does a great job with his nervous character, and especially so when he has to act like a butterfly in a human body (yes, that happens, and it’s brilliant). Lulu Wilson, best known for horror films like Annabelle: Creation, is very well cast in the nerdy-girl-who-ditched-her-friends-to-be-popular type of role. Jack Martin is very entertaining in the deliberately over-the-top character who is somewhere halfway between Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds and Gary Oldman in Leon: The Professional. Although Gaten Matarazzo is not doing anything outside of his wheelhouse, as he’s technically playing another character who wants to eat pizza and play fantasy board games (like in Stranger Things), he is very fun to watch in this as one of the leads, who is a modern spin on another formulaic teen comedy movie character. There’s also a very fun cameo voice performance here that put a smile on my face.
Eventually, the film does run out of steam despite being fairly well-paced. But despite losing me somewhere in the third act, the film does nail the landing (largely due to the aforementioned fourth-wall-break). The extent to which you will be annoyed by the formulaic and tropey nature of the film will vary from person to person, but it didn’t bother me too much. In fact, I think this feature debut has all the makings of a stoner comedy cult film for a new generation, if those films can still reach an audience in the streaming age.
7.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 