{"id":522653,"date":"2026-03-14T06:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T06:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/522653\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T06:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T06:20:12","slug":"gaten-matarazzo-in-a-goofy-bad-trip-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/522653\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaten Matarazzo in a Goofy Bad-Trip Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf your first thought on encountering a film called \u201cPizza Movie<\/a>\u201d is that it\u2019s kind of a dumb title, don\u2019t worry: Brian McElhaney<\/a> and Nick Kocher<\/a>\u2018s 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\u2019t right, but it\u2019s also only temporary. \u201cForgetting\u201d to change it, of course, is one of many missed details and sloppy errors that \u201cPizza Movie\u201d feigns in its quest for chaotic stoner-movie cultdom \u2014 a \u201cDude, Where\u2019s My Car?\u201d for the Zoomer era, for better or worse or, ideally, both.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s an ironic challenge in retooling this genre for a generation famously more straight-edge than its living predecessors, though McElhaney and Kocher \u2014 nothing if not self-aware, as seasoned purveyors of internet sketch comedy \u2014 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tCompounding the relative wholesomeness is the casting of erstwhile \u201cStranger Things\u201d moppet Gaten Matarazzo<\/a> as the most gung-ho (and top-billed) of our hapless trippers: Calling \u201cPizza Movie\u201d his first grown-up role would be a sore betrayal of the film\u2019s 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 \u2014 also a baby-faced former child actor, with Disney Channel credentials to subvert \u2014 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<\/a> premiere.<\/p>\n

\n\tJack (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\u2019re regular targets for high school-level bullying by the alpha jocks on campus. Among the latter\u2019s 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 \u2014 hidden by the room\u2019s kooky former resident, played by \u201cSaturday Night Live\u2019s\u201d Sarah Sherman \u2014 livens things up considerably.<\/p>\n

\n\tCue various stages of hallucinatory hijinks, from body swaps to exploding heads to a time-loop setpiece lifted directly from \u201cGroundhog Day.\u201d McElhaney and Kocher\u2019s script fires gags so rapidly and indiscriminately at the audience that it hardly matters how many are stolen, or how many don\u2019t land at all. One barely has time to clock that it\u2019s Daniel Radcliffe voicing Montgomery\u2019s surreally empowered pet butterfly before \u201cPizza Movie\u201d dives into yet another short-term reality shift, or a \u201cclowncore vomit opera\u201d musical number, or a surprisingly artful silhouette-based animated interlude detailing the grim fate of a neighboring dorm.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a whisper of a plot connecting these scattershot ideas and images \u2014 besides the endlessly sidetracked pizza-collection journey, our heroes must fight a mass eviction scheme by the dorm\u2019s vindictive chief RA (Jack Martin) \u2014 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\u2019s this.) <\/p>\n

\n\tStory 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\u2019s never to risk anything out of the ordinary again, as \u201cPizza Movie\u201d finally emerges as paean to the staid pleasures of takeout and staying in. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn their first feature outing after years of sketch work for \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d Comedy Central and FunnyOrDie, among others, McElhaney and Kocher (jointly known in comedy circles at BriTANick) don\u2019t 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 \u2014 as, for that matter, does the natural spark between Matarazzo\u2019s repeatedly foiled would-be swagger and Giambrone\u2019s disarming mama\u2019s-boy act. \u201cPizza Movie\u201d is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If your first thought on encountering a film called \u201cPizza Movie\u201d is that it\u2019s kind of a dumb…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[235650,88,177029,206,235651,229543,66422],"class_list":["post-522653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-brian-mcelhaney","tag-entertainment","tag-gaten-matarazzo","tag-movies","tag-nick-kocher","tag-pizza-movie","tag-sxsw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}