If your first thought when you see a movie called “Pizza Movie” is that the title is kind of silly, don’t worry. Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher’s zany, frantic comedy is way ahead of your time. Late in the proceedings, a haphazard fourth-wall break leaves us at the desks of the writer-director pair, who mutually agree that the title isn’t quite right, but that it’s only temporary. Of course, “forgetting” to change it is just one of the many missed details and sloppy mistakes that “The Pizza Movie” pretends to be in its pursuit of chaotic stoner movie cultdom. The era of the zoomer is good, bad, or ideally both.
There are ironic challenges in refreshing the genre for a generation famously more straightforward than its living predecessors, but McElhaney and Kocher are above it, if not self-aware, veteran purveyors of Internet sketch comedy. While the stoners in this stoner movie are naive chancers tricked into a baroque nightmare of a drug trip by a dusty box containing an unidentified drug, their incredibly complex mission is to retrieve the freshly delivered pizza that cures their crippling high.
Adding to the relative sanity is that former Stranger Things moppet Gaten Matarazzo has been cast in the most extravagant (and highly paid) role of the hapless travelers. Calling his first adult role a “pizza movie” would be a gross betrayal of the film’s vaunted children’s principles, but his spirited performance here nevertheless shows that it could transcend YA territory. His bubbly, good-natured buddy role with co-star Sean Giambrone (also a baby-faced former child actor with Disney Channel subversion credentials) is the most appealing asset of this romp that manically veers between the very funny and the very disgusting, and that’s pretty much the idea. Audiences of variously inebriated college students will likely forgive the film’s inconsistencies when it is released on Hulu next month after its SXSW premiere.
Jack (Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Giambrone) are affably goofy college roommates whose friendship grows as a result of their shared outcast status. Everyone else in the dorm sees them as losers, and they are constantly targeted by high school-level bullying by alpha jocks on campus. Among the latter group is Lizzie (Lulu Wilson), a secretly nerdy blonde. She used to hang out with Jack and Montgomery, but her beauty and smarts proved enough to change her allegiance. Then, on a typical Friday night, when the men are seen escaping social embarrassment in a room, things get pretty heated when the room’s eccentric former resident (played by “Saturday Night Live’s” Sarah Sherman) stashes away the aforementioned pills.
Cue various stages of hallucinatory hijinks, from body swaps to exploding heads to a time-loop set piece taken directly from “Groundhog Day.” McElhaney and Kocher’s script fires gags at the audience so quickly and indiscriminately that it hardly matters how much is stolen and how much never lands. There’s little time to find out that Daniel Radcliffe is voicing Montgomery’s unrealistically empowered pet butterfly. Then “Pizza Movie” plunges into yet another short-term reality shift, or into a “clowncore vomit opera”-like musical number, or a surprisingly artistic silhouette-based animation interlude detailing the tragic fate of the dormitory next door.
There are whispers of a plot tying these scattered ideas and images together – in addition to an endlessly side-tracked pizza-collecting journey, our hero must contend with a mass eviction plot by the dorm’s vindictive head RA (Jack Martin) – but even that feels overwrought as the film reaches 97 minutes. (The run time is admittedly modest, but if you’re looking for an 80-minute throwaway, this is it.)
The story is beside the point of this exercise and doesn’t really mean anything. Hints of romance between Montgomery and the unexpectedly receptive cool girl Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) are dangled, but they’re deliberately watered down. Even if he and Jack learned something from the ordeal, they would never take any unusual risks again. Because “Pizza Movie” has finally arrived as an ode to the solid pleasures of takeout and staying inside.
It’s his first full-length feature after years of sketch work on “Saturday Night Live,” and Comedy Central and Funny Odie, especially McElhaney and Kocher (known jointly in comedy circles as Britannic), are no strangers to short-form work. This is nothing more than a fragmented film, alternately loud and off-kilter. But its sheer tenacity in cracking jokes bodes well for riskier companies in the future. So too, for that matter, is the natural spark between Matarazzo’s repeatedly thwarted self-proclaimed arrogance and Giambrone’s disarming motherfucker behavior. “Pizza Movie” is practically disposable, but perhaps they have found a comedy duo worth reuniting.
