The old stoner-comedy blueprint is still here in Pizza Movie. It just gets pushed through panic, psychedelia and Gen Z chaos until it starts to feel new again.
There was a time when the drug comedy had a pretty reliable shape. Someone gets high, something small becomes catastrophic, and the whole movie lives in the gap between how clean the plan was and how spectacularly it all came apart. A burger run. A road trip. A night that should have stayed contained.
The formula still works. It always will. Anyone who’s ever watched a simple errand spiral at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday knows exactly what it feels like from the inside. But Pizza Movie pushes it into something that feels a little less Gen X and a little more Gen Z.
That’s what Pizza Movie understands, and what its writer-directors Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher seem to have built the whole film around. The canon didn’t fail, it just aged. The formula stayed the same while the audiences changed, the pacing changed and the altered states people actually wanted to see on screen changed with them.
Pizza Movie, now streaming on Hulu, follows Jack and Montgomery, played by Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone, two freshmen still trying to figure out who they are, which makes them exactly the wrong, or perhaps the best, people to stumble onto a stash of experimental drugs and decide, against all available evidence, that they should take them.
That setup is stoner-comedy DNA in its purest form: simple objective, bad decision, escalating disaster. What McElhaney and Kocher do with it is something stranger.
Same Setup, Stranger Wavelength
For a long time, stoner comedies had a pretty clear lane, and everyone knew where the guardrails were.
McElhaney and Kocher knew exactly where …
Read More
Author: Lucas Indrikovs / High Times
