Week Ending 4/3/26

Harold and Kumar got to White Castle on weed. Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) are trying to get to the lobby of their dorm two floors down on ... a ten-year old designer drug created by a self-proclaimed genius chem major whose volunteer human guinea pig looks like he's been hit by a truck. So, maybe physical distance isn't the real barrier here. Maybe it's the uncertainty of whether their heads will actually explode after "phase three" ends.

Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney's Pizza Movie obviously harkens back to that twenty-plus-year-old (!!) film with a big focus on its irreverent nature. Whereas Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg sought to keep at least one foot in reality to lucidly comment on its social and racial themes, the BriTANicK duo are spraying comedic buckshot at the wall knowing that the pace and volume of their lunacy will stick enough to distract us from everything falling to the floor.

I wasn't optimistic at first. Our introductions to Montgomery buying out the laundromat quarter machine to spectacularly crash and burn while talking to his coin-less crush Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and Jack being mercilessly hunted by a campus blaming him for destroying the football program play so broadly that I raised an eyebrow when the f-bombs started flying. Why was this early Aughts spoof for middle schoolers too young to watch the real thing R-rated?

I ultimately resigned myself to an interminable experience once the "cool kids" (led by Marcus Scribner's Logan) accosted both teens in their dorm room to fart on their faces. The only thing that looked poised to save it was the tin of expired drugs falling from a recessed ceiling tile onto their desk. So, when they finally ingest a pill and transport themselves to a nightmarish vaudeville loop of singing face hands, a naughty marionette, and a baby critic, I hoped for the best.

Pizza Movie thankfully finds its stride once this random bit of absurdity is revealed as a prologue to what Frankie the chem major (Sarah Sherman) calls a five-phase trip with the potential for a horror-fueled sixth if the imbibers don't chase the pharmaceuticals with pizza—hence the title. With monikers like "No Bad Words" and "The Ol' Swicheroo," you can imagine the type of high concept fun Kocher and McElhaney have up their sleeves.

And I haven't even mentioned the villain yet. Because, like all memorable college campus comedies, you need a good narc to threaten the vibes. Enter Blake (Jack Martin), the head of the Resident Advisors, and his mission to purge his dormitory of all the vile, troublesome, and annoying students that have made his life a living Hell. He and his minions become one more point of conflict as Jack, Montgomery, and their turncoat friend Lizzy (Lulu Wilson) fight to survive.

The film transforms into a surreal race against time as the trio must acquire the pizza (held hostage by Snackatron, a robot delivery device) before phase six can destroy whatever necessary revelations about each other and their friendship arise during the prior gauntlet. The phases themselves seek to derail this mission by giving Montgomery the confidence to get to know Ashley, the group a way to rewrite history, and Blake the power to confiscate their phones.

It's a real roller coaster set to eleven as their shared hallucinations take us places you'd never expect if not for the filmmakers' obvious disinterest with plausibility. Whether they inexplicably give one of their leads a butterfly as a pet or allow the entire school to mock the other's face, you can bet the eccentricity and meanness has a payoff. And if Blake or Sidney (Caleb Hearon) often feel like exposition machines, don't worry. They might become cognizant to it too.

We're talking kitchen sink territory as Kocher and McElhaney pull out every stop from animation to meta fourth wall-breaks to a catchy mantra melody hinting at the possibility of death. We get splatter horror effects. Music that even the most hardcore thrasher you know would say goes too far. And a fearlessness to blur the line between what the characters are experiencing and what everyone else around them sees ... sometimes it's the same, sometimes it's not.

So, don't give up if it seems dire at the start. Pizza Movie will get weirder, funnier, and more inventive as it goes. The result is probably the best "this shouldn't be as good as it is" film since Will Gluck's Fired Up! with enough insanity to speak to those who went to college two decades ago and those traversing the halls today. And good on Giambrone, Matarazzo, and Wilson for letting the comedy shine as the three straight men caught in its rapidly devolving, manic fever dream.

6/10

There's an unexplained, anomalous object looming large over the world built by Freddie Wong and Matthew Arnold. A crystalline alien column appears without warning, destroying everything within its wide diameter before "jumping" to another place on Earth to do it all again. Humans treat it like an extinction point because there's no way to stop it, survive it, or live without the possibility of it decimating the ground you inhabit next. But isn't that just life?

Wong and Arnold don't title their film We're All Gonna Die because it's a novel expression of fear. The uncertainty of mortality has cemented that sentiment as a common refrain throughout history. Will you live despite it or succumb to its futility? Will you celebrate the time you had with those who left too soon or lament not having enough? Because despite this sci-fi conceit, the column hasn't actually caused Thalia (Ashly Burch) and Kai's (Jordan Rodrigues) pain.

That's what struck me most here. We assume every bad thing befalling the characters on-screen was a direct result of this metaphorical scythe only to discover their grief is born from the same unfortunate tragedies we all endure. Its presence is therefore a catalyst for Thalia and Kai to collide in the present rather than a reminder of their loneliness. Despite all the deaths that occurred due to its "jumps," one could say its latest tremors are set to save these two specific souls.

You have the sadness of new grief (Kai) and the anger of old (Thalia) providing a harsh (often sarcastically so) mirror for the other to embrace the other's emotion as a path towards acceptance. So, despite the script often going super silly or generically clichéd, trust that it will also mine deep into the authentic trauma at their respective centers. It's as much a road trip to recover their loved ones' surrogates as it is to finally let go. Because absent doesn't mean erased.

7/10