Remember the part in “21 Jump Street” where Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum experience the four distinct phases of a synthetic drug called by the street name “Holy Fucking Shit”? Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher sure do. For their debut feature, the manic twosome — better known as the comedy duo BriTANicK — have essentially just taken that bit and stretched it out to the length of a thin but well-sauced film unto itself, a movie in which two high-as-balls college roommates are forced to make the perilous journey to the lobby of their dorm in order to retrieve the pizza that promises to neutralize their bad trip.
It’s called “Pizza Movie,” it careens between the likes of foreskin jokes, exploding heads, and an “Inglourious Basterds” parody fast enough to make cocaine feel like a depressant, and it owns its irreverent hyper-stupidity with a confidence that its insecure young heroes would kill to have for themselves. Is it funny? Eh. Is it cheap? Very. Does it have a scene where someone gets so fucked up they swap bodies with their pet butterfly? It would be extremely weird of me to ask that rhetorical question in this context if it didn’t. And while precious few of the other bits pay off as well as that one (a killer voice assist from a certain celebrity goes a long way), its madcap absurdity proves typical of a movie that’s willing to do anything to amuse its target audience.
Paced faster than a TikTok and furnished with at least slightly better production values, “Pizza Movie” is a streaming comedy made with no other purpose or ambition than to prove that a classic stoner premise can still hold Gen-Z’s attention for 92 minutes so long as it feels like it’s fresh out of the oven. Based on the fact that it kept this crusty millennial critic entertained for roughly 65 of those minutes (give or take), it’s safe to assume the film makes good on its hypothesis.
“Pizza Movie” doesn’t go out of its way to position itself as some kind of temporal collision, but it can be hard to think about the project through any other lens. McElhaney and Kocher belong to my cohort (I was a little surprised to learn), and are trying to stay true to themselves as they reach down to court a younger demographic. Meanwhile, former child stars Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone — who still read as teenagers despite being well into their 20s — are both trying to reach up for adultish roles that allow them to act a bit closer to their ages, and to do so in a way that brings their fans along for the ride instead of leaving them behind. And all of these people, along with Disney Channel alum Peyton Elizabeth Lee, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” actor Marcus Scribner, and 31-year-old comedian Caleb Hearon, come together in a place that’s unstuck in time: the abandoned campus that production company American High has turned into a permanent set for the kind of school comedies that Hollywood doesn’t really make anymore.
“Pizza Movie” suggests there’s still a real appetite for them. Giambrone, of “Kim Possible” fame, plays Montgomery, a pencil-necked Michael Cera type who “sounds like a little old man” (his words) and aspires to be a certified alpha by the time he graduates, even if he’ll have to jump over half the Greek alphabet to get there. Montgomery rocks a polo sweater that shows off his bony frame, and flirts with his dream girl Ashley (Lee) by waiting for her in the laundry room every week, his pockets stuffed to the seams with extra change in case she needs some. When Ashley points out that Montgomery is always there, he nervously responds that “No one’s got dirtier undies than me! Not poop, to be clear. Or cum.” Then, as he swears to her that he’s not as weird as he seems, his shorts erupt in a fortune’s worth of quarters.
In case that doesn’t give you a decent sense of this movie’s heightened milieu (imagine the meticulous visual mania of “Scott Pilgrim” transplanted over a “Superbad” plot on the budget of an “SNL” sketch), Montgomery’s roommate Jack is then introduced being tied to a clocktower and pelted with balloons full of piss because he did something to upset the college football team. Played by Matarazzo, whose curly hair and relative worldliness help to cement the Jonah Hill of it all, Jack is struggling to enjoy what are supposed to be the best years of his life. All he wants to do is drink some of the booze he’s smuggled into his dorm and have a fun night being nerds with Montgomery.
That’s when Jack discovers the tin full of custom drugs that were left in their room by the demented chemistry major who used to live there (the reliably hilarious Sarah Sherman, appearing in a step-by-step YouTube tutorial about surviving the pills her character invented). They’re called Mind Igniting Neural Tuning Stimulants, aka “MINTS,” and they basically allow McElhaney and Kocher’s script to do whatever it wants. The first of the drug’s six phases, for example, involves our heroes being swallowed by a giant squid and forced to entertain the unamused human baby in its belly. The next traps them in a “Groundhog Day”-esque time loop where their heads pop like Gushers every time they swear. Things only grow more surreal from there, and will continue to do so until the boys get their hands on the pizza they ordered as an antidote.
Stoner comedies have conditioned us to accept that Montgomery and Jack — ohhhh like two kinds of cheese, cause it’s “Pizza Movie,” I just got that — might be sharing the same trip, but it quickly begins to seem like the MINTS are warping the fabric of reality itself. Trust that this is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, McElhaney and Kocher couldn’t be happier to abandon any pretense of logic, and their film only gets funnier as it elevates familiar tropes to psychotropic new places as part of its panicked bid for laughs.
Well-worn cliches and story beats, many of them shouldered by Lulu Wilson’s Lizzy (an aspiring cool girl who risks her already precarious social status by taking some MINTS for herself), give way to extended bouts of joke-a-second comic delirium. Some of the gags are inspired, some are exasperating, none of them are presented in a way that suggests the filmmakers know the difference, and all of them are shoved down your throat until they’re diminished enough to swallow. In fact, “Pizza Movie” speeds by so fast that individual bits can alternate between lame and brilliant in the span of a few seconds; the “curse words” sequence comes to mind, as a silly new detail about the drugs suddenly redeems a bit that seemed like it was running on empty. That dynamic is also reversed at times, as Hearon’s part — that of a sweet-natured rookie RA who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the film’s Nazi-coded dorm cops — is funnier as a fish-out-of-water thing before it strains for laughs by dressing him as the Grinch in a diaper.
But even when “Pizza Movie” feels stale, which is rather often, there’s something wonderful about how nakedly it’s trying to amuse. While McElhaney and Kocher don’t land enough of their punchlines for me to ever think about reheating their film for another watch, they also never take the easy way out; even the worst jokes here are possessed with a real love of the game, and held together by the centrifugal force of two people who are doing everything in their power to revitalize the kinds of movies that were a key part of the American promise before we surrendered most of the comedy universe to social media. How fitting that the film’s biggest laugh comes from a moment when its creators obliterate the fourth wall and show us exactly how hard they tried to accomplish that goal.
Grade: C
“Pizza Movie” will be available to stream on Hulu starting Friday, April 3.
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