GARRETT VS PIZZA MOVIE

Garrett Cook watches a throwback to stoner comedies of yore. Can you even, like, review a film?

Pizza Movie: Half Baked or a Little Slice of Heaven?

Directed by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney

Written by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney

Starring Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone and Lulu Wilson

Sometimes it’s fun to be a dipshit. Comedy where you follow someone being a dipshit through an odyssey of crazy crap dates back beyond Aristophanes. As the saying goes, “beauty fades but dumb is forever”.  And yet, post Harold and Kumar, our Marvel-fied Hollywood has not given us many opportunities to follow some dipshits around as they get into misadventures- not unless those dipshits happen to be Thor and Loki in Thor:Ragnarok. Thor: Seemed like maybe this archetype was going to just fade away. Fortunately though, two YouTube comedy sensations turned SNL writers took Dustin from Stranger Things (Gaten Matarazzo as Jack) and Adam (Sean Giambrone as Montgomery)  from The Goldbergs, gave them terrible drugs found in their ceiling and made SNL cringequeen Sarah Sherman their trip sitter. Then they added the very charismatic Lulu Wilson playing their friend Lizzy who got popular with the bullies who torment the two stoned nerds mercilessly.

Pizza Movie is a movie about three people on terrible drugs trying to pick up a pizza. It’s just that simple. Then again, Harold and Kumar were just trying to go to Whitecastle, Wayne and Garth were just adjusting to their show getting picked up for syndication and Bill and Ted were trying to pass history. Life gets fun and complicated when you’re a dipshit. What follows is of course a series of escalating absurdities, dick and fart jokes and villainous authority figures. Head RA Blake has serious Niedemeyer from Animal House cache and plays it with awesome scenechewing mania as he plots to steal the cellphones of the worst kids in his dorm and send them to off campus housing four hours away. It’s the kind of plan you see out of the venomous middle management Wilhelm Reich warned us about.

The visuals in this film are fun and crazy, what with the drugs and such. When you let your film do drugs, fun stuff happens. We don’t need to quibble about how much of this feels like it’s just a remake of Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams because we’re having a good time and watching dumb people trip balls while trying to grab a pizza downstairs from a needy delivery drone voiced by Bpbby Moynihan. To go into specifics is to deprive this film of one of its biggest strengths: the element of surprise. Surprise is the essence of comedy. If I describe a joke, it loses a lot of its potency. Suffice to say the film is told from the perspective of three people who are having a really bad time on drugs and we get to have a really good time. This is, after all, stoner comedy and not Requiem for a Dream.

Should you see Pizza Movie? I don’t know, do you like to laugh? Are you enough of an individual to not feel embarrassed to laugh at something that’s very, very stupid? Are you literally eating a pizza right now? Then, yeah you should immediately watch Pizza Movie. You have nothing to lose but the respect of uptight RAs everywhere.

Garrett Cook is a Bizarro and horror author. He resides in Portland, Oregon with his partner of almost ten years. He has recently begun doing design work for TTRPGs.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.