Overstuffed and cheesy, Pizza Movie is stoner comedy junk food

The drug-fueled sketch fest won't sit well with everyone, despite having a few tasty toppings here and there.

By Natalia Keogan | April 1, 2026 | 1:00pm

Photo: Hulu

Film Reviews Gaten Matarazzo

Overstuffed and cheesy, Pizza Movie is stoner comedy junk food

There’s an art to the stoner comedy. There’s usually a grand (or low-key) conspiracy that a crew of eccentric potheads seem extremely ill-equipped to tackle, only to find that their altered state eventually helps more than it hinders. The narrative must be requisitely taut to prevent the meandering reality of being high, and the plot developments have to be clever enough to cater to equally intoxicated viewers while never veering into outright confounding territory for the very same reason. Of course, rules are made to be broken, and Pizza Movie filmmakers Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher (known by the moniker BriTANicK) throw caution to the wind—and every conceivable idea at the wall to see what sticks.

Best known for their sketch work as writers on Saturday Night Live, FunnyOrDie, and CollegeHumor, BriTANicK’s shortform sensibility is woven into the fabric of Pizza Movie, which offers punchlines, gags, and one-liners in such rapid succession that it’s hard to appreciate a joke even when it’s good—and, perhaps by design, easy to forget its more cringe-inducing stabs at comedy. It’s a palatable enough format, but reminiscent of the time-suck of being stoned and aimlessly scrolling through TikTok. You might encounter a gem or two, but by the time you exit the app, you feel guilty for not having done something more productive instead.

The buddies at the center of Pizza Movie are Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone), who are staunchly situated at the bottom of their college’s social hierarchy. Naturally, they’re prime targets for jock abuse, which mostly consists of football players holding the friends down and farting in their faces while a gaggle of cool kids giggle on the sidelines. One such spectator is Lizzy (Lulu Wilson), whose blonde hair and trendy clothes are mere window dressing for her nerd-adjacent interests. She actually used to be quite close with Jack and Montgomery back in the day, happily playing board games and consuming geeky media with glee before joining the dark side.

After a particularly rancid round of torture, the boys resign to spending the rest of their night—if not their entire lives—alone together. They decide to order a pizza and avoid the social threats that lurk around every corner, but then a small metal tin falls from the ceiling. It contains nondescript pills, and after stumbling upon instructions left by the dorm’s former dweller (Sarah Sherman), the guys learn that the drug, called M.I.N.T.S., induces intense hallucinations that can culminate in full-blown ego death. So long as they consume yeast, tomato, and cheese before the catastrophic final phase of this high, a thrilling, life-changing trip awaits. Since they have the antidote coming to them in the form of a large pie, they figure why the hell not?

Nothing goes according to plan. They find themselves so incapacitated that descending the two flights of stairs to retrieve their pizza—from a silly Waymo delivery robot, no less—proves impossible. On top of that, they are relentlessly transported into a surreal shared mind palace, where heads explode (in a blatant homage to Groundhog Day), a pet butterfly can talk (voiced by a criminally sparse Daniel Radcliffe), and the action is punctuated by the sonic assault of a “clowncore vomit opera.” Some of these sequences work better than others, but the pacing is off across the board. There are so many bits that it’s impossible to fully commit to them all, especially when there’s another overarching plotline involving an evil RA inciting a mass exodus from their current dorm building to one of the dingier corners of campus.

While watching Pizza Movie, the simplicity of the movie’s name in contrast with its incessantly irreverent antics feels like a massive misstep. Just when this nagging annoyance hits its peak, the audience is transported to a dull writers’ room where McElhaney and Kocher languish over the film’s “temporary” title, threatening self-harm if “Pizza Movie” actually sticks. This is an admittedly clever way to distract from the film’s laundry list of narrative inconsistencies and unproductive absurdities. But it’s still largely untethered to the bigger picture, merely adding to the amorphous hodgepodge of skits that make up the movie.

If Pizza Movie serves any larger purpose, it’s as an audition tape for Matarazzo and Giambrone’s future in sketch comedy. Both forged in the fires of child stardom—Matarazzo famous for growing up on Stranger Things, Giambrone a Disney Channel stalwart—they deftly calibrate their slapstick reactions and emotional registers from scene to scene, and joke to joke, without breaking under the constant tonal whiplash. There is room for vulgarity, horror, absurdity, and a whole lot of heart in Pizza Movie, though just barely, like attempting to host a rager in a 12′ x 14′ dorm room. The resulting stoner comedy is awkward, weird, and doesn’t quite work, but it just might become a core memory for those among the couchlocked who have yet to experience a proper house party.

Director: Brian McElhaney, Nick Kocher
Writer: Brian McElhaney, Nick Kocher
Starring: Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone, Lulu Wilson, Jack Martin, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Marcus Scribner, Caleb Hearon, Sarah Sherman, Justin Cooley, Daniel Radcliffe
Release Date: April 3, 2026 (Hulu)

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