Slice of cheesy fun
Teen comedies are almost exclusively a streaming affair these days. I chalk it up to a couple of factors: the theatrical economy is increasingly stacked around mega-budget tentpoles and horror (two genres that lose juice on a small screen in ways that dramas and comedies don’t), and teen comedies themselves have less cultural cachet than at any point since John Hughes’s prime. The kids also have their eyes on other screens now (e.g. TikTok) so the audience has drifted.
If you’re as much of a sucker for the genre as I am, that might sound like a eulogy. But I’ve found some silver linings. Chief among them: streaming gives some of these releases room to be weirder and less commercial, tuned less to a multiplex date-night crowd and more to buzzed college kids flipping on Hulu at 1 a.m. (Or, sure, 37-year-old film critics mourning the passage of their own youth.)
Enter Pizza Movie, a wacky and energetic little stoner comedy that seems engineered around the sustained question: “what would increase the odds of this becoming a cult hit?” (Not the same as “what would increase the odds of this being a good comedy film?” but not mutually exclusive.) Everything here is aiming for word-of-mouth buzz: It has the so-dumb-it’s-good title. It has the batshit premise (two losers ingest a drug that lets them manipulate the continuity of cinema itself in pursuit of a pizza). It has a never-ending supply of oddball jokes and set pieces, and (this is where I perked up) a disproportionate amount of attention paid to the flashier elements of its craft. I can’t recall seeing many split diopters in a teen comedy before, let alone split diopters lovingly composed around a pizza box.
The film is the feature debut of BriTANicK, the longtime YouTube sketch duo of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher (like Radio Silence, they need to be credited as individuals because the directors guilds don’t recognize collectives). BriTANicK has been quietly accumulating a profile for a decade-plus, including a stint writing for Saturday Night Live. Those SNL connections almost certainly helped Pizza Movie off the ground. It’s a production of American High, the scrappy boutique teen comedy label working out of a converted upstate New York high school that has a recurring habit of collaborating with SNL talent. (Between Banana Split, Crush, Summer of 69, and now this, they’ve quietly built a lane I’ll happily keep visiting.)
That the film is directed by YouTube sketch comedians is fairly obvious, and that’s a mixed blessing. Pizza Movie often has the cadence of watching a series of short videos, each segment pushed to some extreme before jumping to the next beat. The escalation engine applies to a certain extent in the macro structure, too: the drug’s phased structure (borrowed in spirit from the 21 Jump Street synthetic-drug gag) gives the film a built-in ladder for each set piece to top the last. Tonally, the obvious comp is a 2020’s-set Scott Pilgrim meets Superbad: meticulous visual mania laid over a simple hangout framework of two young men sorting through their fraying friendship across one crazy night. Though the budget was probably about as much as a single SNL sketch, cinematographer Bella Gonzales squeezes every penny of it. Her savvy lighting, visual mood, and trippy imagery keeps the film feeling visually composed and sharper-looking than most streaming fare.
Unfortunately, the film opens with its absolute worst joke: a jock farting in a nerd’s face while a crowd chants “YEAH! FART IN HIS FACE!” (Comedians take note: playing up that your joke is unfunny doesn’t make it more funny.) This moment sets you up for a much stupider movie, or at least a stupidly stupid one, when most of what follows is smartly stupid. Stranger Things alum Gaten Matarazzo and sitcom actor Sean Giambrone anchor the film reasonably well with genuine, committed-friendship chemistry as pothead Jack and geek Monty, respectively. Matarazzo’s stage background (he’s done some musicals between Stranger Things seasons) informs his physical comedy with a fearless nimbleness that the movie keeps finding new ways to exploit, and Giambrone is a reliably funny straight man for the escalating nonsense. Lulu Wilson joins in as a third wheel and love interest for Monty, playing firmly against her horror girl type. The supporting bench is fun, too: Sarah Sherman pops up as the drug’s deranged inventor, and I’ll always embrace any project that finds room for Caleb Hearon as a wacky scene-stealer. Prom Pact star Peyton Elizabeth Lee stops by for a couple of scenes, and Bobby Moynihan and Daniel Radcliffe voice a robot and butterfly, because why-the-hell-not.
Where Pizza Movie flags is the back half. The film cycles through its ideas so quickly, and so eagerly chases whiz-bang laughs, that the landing is a little bumpy. By the final stretch it’s visibly running low on new gears to shift to, though a few late gags, including an extended meta joke, land. A cynic might also argue that the college drug comedy, as a form, might have felt edgier thirty years ago and reads as a bit passé and try-hard in 2026. I wouldn’t be so cynical. Pizza Movie is a bit of a throwaway, sure, but it has more invention and personality on offer than your average streaming fare, and honestly plenty of theatrical releases, too. I hope little producers like American High and the streamers keep handing modest budgets to hungry, clever filmmakers like these. If the theater ecosystem can’t make space for them, at least my heart will.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.