If your first thought on encountering a film called “Pizza Movie” is that it’s kind of a dumb title, don’t worry: Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher‘s antic, frantic comedy is way ahead of you. Late in proceedings, a haphazard fourth-wall break throws us to the pair of writer-directors at their desk, agreeing with each other that the title isn’t right, but it’s also only temporary. “Forgetting” to change it, of course, is one of many missed details and sloppy errors that “Pizza Movie” feigns in its quest for chaotic stoner-movie cultdom — a “Dude, Where’s My Car?” for the Zoomer era, for better or worse or, ideally, both.
There’s an ironic challenge in retooling this genre for a generation famously more straight-edge than its living predecessors, though McElhaney and Kocher — nothing if not self-aware, as seasoned purveyors of internet sketch comedy — are on top of that, too. The stoners in this stoner movie are naively accidental ones, tricked into a baroque nightmare of a drug trip by a dusty box of unidentified pills, while their improbably complicated mission is to retrieve the freshly delivered pizza that will make the bad high go away.
Compounding the relative wholesomeness is the casting of erstwhile “Stranger Things” moppet Gaten Matarazzo as the most gung-ho (and top-billed) of our hapless trippers: Calling “Pizza Movie” his first grown-up role would be a sore betrayal of the film’s proudly juvenile principles, but nonetheless, his spirited performance here shows possibilities beyond the YA realm. His buoyant, good-natured buddy act with co-star Sean Giambrone — also a baby-faced former child actor, with Disney Channel credentials to subvert — is the most appealing asset of a romp that pinballs manically between quite funny and quite tiresome, which is pretty much the idea. College-age viewers in various states of inebriation will likely forgive the film its inconsistencies when it lands on Hulu next month, following an SXSW premiere.
Jack (Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Giambrone) are amiably dorky college roommates whose friendship is strengthened by shared outcast status: Everyone else in their dorm regards them as losers, while they’re regular targets for high school-level bullying by the alpha jocks on campus. Among the latter’s clique is secretly nerdy blonde Lizzie (Lulu Wilson), who used to hang out with Jack and Montgomery, before proving pretty and canny enough to switch allegiances. A typical Friday night, then, sees the guys sheltering from social shame in their room, when a chance discovery of the aforementioned pills — hidden by the room’s kooky former resident, played by “Saturday Night Live’s” Sarah Sherman — livens things up considerably.
Cue various stages of hallucinatory hijinks, from body swaps to exploding heads to a time-loop setpiece lifted directly from “Groundhog Day.” McElhaney and Kocher’s script fires gags so rapidly and indiscriminately at the audience that it hardly matters how many are stolen, or how many don’t land at all. One barely has time to clock that it’s Daniel Radcliffe voicing Montgomery’s surreally empowered pet butterfly before “Pizza Movie” dives into yet another short-term reality shift, or a “clowncore vomit opera” musical number, or a surprisingly artful silhouette-based animated interlude detailing the grim fate of a neighboring dorm.
There’s a whisper of a plot connecting these scattershot ideas and images — besides the endlessly sidetracked pizza-collection journey, our heroes must fight a mass eviction scheme by the dorm’s vindictive chief RA (Jack Martin) — yet even that feels excessive as the film saunters to 97 minutes. (A modest runtime, certainly, but if anything demands to be an 80-minute throwaway, it’s this.)
Story is beside the point of this exercise, which is really the absence of any point at all. A hint of romance between Montgomery and unexpectedly receptive cool girl Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is dangled before being wilfully scuppered; if he and Jack learn anything from their ordeal, it’s never to risk anything out of the ordinary again, as “Pizza Movie” finally emerges as paean to the staid pleasures of takeout and staying in.
In their first feature outing after years of sketch work for “Saturday Night Live,” Comedy Central and FunnyOrDie, among others, McElhaney and Kocher (jointly known in comedy circles at BriTANick) don’t exactly stretch beyond their affinity for short-form work. This is nothing if not a film of fragments, alternately raucous and off-target. But the sheer relentlessness of its joke-cracking bodes well for future, riskier enterprises — as, for that matter, does the natural spark between Matarazzo’s repeatedly foiled would-be swagger and Giambrone’s disarming mama’s-boy act. “Pizza Movie” is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.