College is a good time for many people who found high school to be awkward since it’s usually a new group of people and a chance to start over without past expectations or trauma. But it’s just as possible that college won’t be the mecca it was promised to be, and will instead serve merely as an extension of the misery that unpopularity offers to those unfortunate enough to suffer it. Pizza Movie doesn’t try to paint a rosier picture of that reality for its protagonists, taking them instead on a mind-bending drug trip as a last-ditch effort to escape from what they have to endure every day.
Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) are most certainly not living it up. They are regularly visited by a group of bullies who pin them down and fart in their faces, and Jack is universally detested for what he did to the football team (watch the film to find out just what it was), while Montgomery can’t work up the courage to ask out Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), the girl he likes. Their night changes, initially for the better, when they find drugs in their dorm room, but they soon learn that they come with a lot of strings attached, uniting them with their old friend Lizzy (Lulu Wilson) in a fight to survive the insane stages of its effects.
Pizza Movie is the first feature film from Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, also known as BriTANicK, whose past writing credits include Saturday Night Live and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as well as another SXSW premiere this year, Over Your Dead Body. They bring a wild sense of creativity to an unapologetic and proud stoner movie, one that bothers to construct a narrative, however over-the-top it may be, around both the origins of the drugs (cooked up by a previous dorm resident played by Sarah Sherman, whose zany YouTube videos warn them far too late of the consequences) and the surrounding stakes, which mainly involve the fear of being assigned housing in the worst possible dorm that’s known for crushing hopes and dreams.
Both of this film’s young stars come from the world of television, with Matarazzo best known for Stranger Things and Giambrone a veteran of The Goldbergs. This film feels a little like what Matarazzo’s character Dustin might experience when he goes off to college, with a (slightly) less supernatural bent but a similar belief in the power of entering other dimensions and what happens there translating back to the real world. The two are a great duo wonderfully paired for this assignment, and they’re complemented spectacularly by an actress with solid TV and horror movie experience, Wilson, who has more attitude and a (moderately) better social life but is just as capable of geeking out under the influence of these extremely potent drugs.
Where Pizza Movie works best is in its design of the stages, spelled out by Sherman’s Frankie, which its three protagonists must go through as the drugs move through their systems. One particularly entertaining sequence involves their heads exploring every time they utter a curse word, which leads to them experimenting to see which words trigger it and which don’t, as well as to repeat interactions to test knowledge and outcomes to see which might work best. There’s a lot of cleverness to how it’s all put together, adding some intelligence to a movie that isn’t trying to traffic in that, content to give its audience an enthralling and absurd ride but always with a little bit more logic than might be needed.
There’s plenty that feels irreverent about this film, which is of course the idea, not least of which is the presence of Caleb Hearon as a new RA not quickly adjusting to the way things work under the tyrannical rule of Blake (Jack Martin), who is determined to shut down every party he can. There are lots of laughs to be found in this film, even if audiences come at it from a fully lucid state. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a stoner movie but manages to feel pretty fresh anyway, laying out its expectations clearly and delivering quite well on them.
Movie Rating: 7/10
