My least favorite scene in any comedy is where the characters get stoned, and they have psychedelic hallucinations for five-10 minutes. It’s never funny or witty.
Now there’s Pizza Movie, in which just about the entire movie is different versions of that scene. Last year’s Friendship beautifully subverted that idea with its toad-venom scene, but Pizza Movie thinks the usual trope doesn’t go far enough. The film’s directors, Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, are trying to pay tribute to the legacy of stoner movies of the past, but their stars, the kid from The Goldbergs and the kid from Stranger Things, aren’t exactly Cheech and Chong. The best description for this is, “What if it were Superbad, except it sucked?”
Pizza Movie has one of the more contrived gimmicks I’ve ever heard in a comedy: Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) are nerdy college students who are best friends and roommates. Both down-and-out for various reasons, they stumble upon a hallucinogenic drug called MINTS.
This drug, due entirely to the ridiculous contrivances of the plot, gives them a series of different types of trips with periods of lucidity in between. Also, there are weird little built-in rules, one of which is that they can break the spell by eating pizza. SNL’s Sarah Sherman, in a YouTube video within the film, pops up once in a while to explain how it works.
The plot ends up becoming a series of sketches, a couple of which are moderately funny. I enjoyed the one where the gimmick is that if either of the guys curses, it makes their heads explode, at which point the scene resets, Groundhog Day-style. But the rest? Not great.
The duo has multiple groups of people who are mad at them and standing in their way, including a group of all-purpose bullies, a militant clan of beret-clad resident advisors, and the school’s football team. It’s like the pre-frosh from PCU, chased around campus by different activists, except a lot less funny. The film sets up that the football team is mad at Jack because of something he did to accidentally sabotage them, and once the payoff arrives, it’s really dumb.
The filmmakers, meanwhile, are in love with the trope of “characters walking slowly towards the camera while loud music plays,” because that happens five different times.
Pizza Movie comes from the production company American High, whose previous work, on films like Plan B, Crush, and Sex Appeal, I’ve enjoyed. Those movies have high-concept gimmicks, usually involving female or queer characters, but Pizza Movie is dude-oriented. Like most of those, Pizza Movie headed straight to Hulu after a debut at South by Southwest in March. This strikes me as the type of movie that probably killed in Austin, but it’s not going to play nearly as well in the living room.