‘Pizza Movie’ Review: A Trippy College Comedy That Wants to Be the Next Cult Classic

About as close as you can get to a teen movie that actually feels like it was made by teens, Pizza Movie might as well have been directed by people the same age—or honestly, even younger—than its characters. It’s a trippy, chaotic, dumb-in-a-good-way comedy that runs on the exact wavelength of its target audience: kids raised on late-night movies and random internet videos. By comparison, something like Superbad suddenly looks like Oscar bait.

The film clearly wants to become one of those cult teen comedies about drugs, following two nerdy college freshmen who get high on something they don’t understand—and then have to deal with the consequences. It all starts in the most absurd way possible. Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) are classic super-nerds. Jack is confident and likable, but everyone hates him because of some mysterious football-related scandal. Montgomery, on the other hand, is pure anxiety and has no idea how to talk to the girl he likes.

They’re constant targets of bullying, so they mostly hide out in their dorm room, ordering pizza and playing games. One night, a group barges in, harasses them (their idea of fun involves farting in their faces), spills their alcohol, and trashes the place. Then—because why not—some mysterious pills fall from the ceiling. The guys look them up online, find a video promising an intense psychedelic trip, and take them. And yeah, it delivers.

Once the high starts to wear off, they keep watching the video and realize they’ve made a huge mistake: if they don’t eat during the trip, things can get very bad—like, dangerously bad.

So that’s the movie: two guys trying to make it across a couple floors of their college building to pick up a pizza delivered by a robot. For them, it’s basically an epic quest. Everyone is out to get them, and the drug keeps hitting in waves, bringing increasingly bizarre effects—time travel, body-swapping, you name it. Along the way, Lizzie (Lulu Wilson), an estranged friend, joins them, and they run into a kind of anti-drug patrol roaming the halls, threatening to send offenders to the college equivalent of Siberia.

The result is a hyperactive, silly, absurd comedy with a few genuinely funny bits and some effective gags. But the humor will probably feel pretty thin to anyone over 20—or anyone watching it completely sober. Pizza Movie tries so hard to become a cult classic that it throws everything at the wall in the process. Whether it gets there or not is another question.

The directing duo (both former Saturday Night Live writers) leave no comedic device unused. This is full-on cringe comedy, occasionally hinting at something more—there’s a brief, softer layer about friendship that almost works—but it never really goes deeper than that.

Matarazzo feels perfectly cast for this kind of role and delivers exactly what you’d expect from such an expressive performer. Giambrone brings his usual awkward, nervous charm, and while the duo has a certain appeal, there’s not much else around them beyond quick cameos and forgettable side characters, like the anti-drug patrol leader played by Jack Martin.

Fast, forgettable, kind of fun but also exhausting, Pizza Movie might do great in college dorm rooms across the U.S.—but it’s hard to see it becoming a true classic. Then again… stranger things have happened.