In 2004, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of stoner movies Harold and Kumar go to White Castle was released, instantly becoming a cult classic amongst stoners and alternative groups alike.
22 years later, we have the modern equivalent of such, in the wonderfully bizarre and wacky world of Pizza Movie.
The premise of the film is simple. Main characters Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Monty (Sean Giambrone) take these strange and mysterious drugs, and find out that unless they eat pizza soon after taking them, they will suffer a fate too horrifying and vulgar to write.
We follow their quest to reach the lobby of their student accommodation to retrieve their pizza from robot delivery boy ‘Snackatron-3000’. However, they must face the six phases of the drug trip, along with the sadistic and power-hungry Student Resident Assistants who wish to transfer our main characters into the worst student accommodation – Gralk Hall.
Pizza Movie combines humorous references to other films such as Inglorious Basterds with meta, 4th-wall breaking humour, delivering punchline after punchline without giving you time to rest in-between. The humour, whilst some claim to be “too vulgar”, to me, is so unbelievably silly and ridiculous that you just get lost in the wackiness of it all. You really start to love the characters, human or butterfly.
The characters themselves are, self-admittedly by the movie itself, somewhat 2-dimensional caricatures of tropes, but they are either so loveable or hateable that you can’t help but get truly invested in their utterly stupid escapades. Whether that be the quest to retrieve the pizza, Monty finally working up the courage to talk to his crush, or to confiscate the phones of everyone to request their hall transfer, you truly get invested in it, just for something even more stupid than before to happen just after you thought it couldn’t get any sillier.
All-in-all, this film combines a butterfly named Lysander Featherhelm, Lord of the Syracuse Meadows (somehow voiced by Daniel Radcliff?), a quite literally mind-blowing drug trip, and an angry Chilean man named Juan, to create an experience for the viewer which will have you questioning why you’re watching this, and yet, enjoy every second of it.
On the surface, it’s a silly movie about drugs and pizza, but in reality, it’s about the beauty of friendship and love – and leave you never wanting to try drugs in your life.
