Before you delve into this article about the trip “Pizza Movie” is, there are going to be spoilers past what you’ve probably seen in the trailer. There are also “mature” topics discussed in this article, so be warned.
I don’t even know where to start. The drugs, urine-filled water balloons, Daniel Radcliffe; this movie is packed with conversation starters and “what in the heck did I just witness?” moments. I’ll start with the plot. Two college students, Montgomery (the well-behaved one) and Jack (the rowdy one), decide to take some drugs that fall out of their ceiling when some other students come in to–I kid you not–fart on Jack and Montgomery’s faces. This becomes probably 50% of their dialogue for the rest of the film. Eventually, the two are joined by Lizzy, a girl they had been friends with until she joined the bullies’ group just to be popular.
The drugs in question are not your typical magic mushrooms or marijuana. They’re called “M.I.N.T.S.” (Mind Igniting Neural Tuning Stimulants), a drug that gives you six stages of surreal hallucinations that are nonsensical and fourth-wall breaking. One of my favorites was the body swap, where Jack and Lizzy switched bodies and then Montgomery and his pet butterfly switched. Seeing Montgomery slowly flapping his wings and saying “I crave nectar” became something I now quote on a daily.
The last stage, accordingly named “Your Worst Nightmare Comes to Life and Shoves a Chainsaw Up Your A**,” can only be stopped if you eat pizza. And yes, we see one side character who went through that stage being lifted invisibly by a hallucinated mall Santa and, well, getting a metaphorical chainsaw shoved up his butt. I have no better way of explaining this scene. The whole movie revolves around the three trying to get to the lobby while surviving the five stages before they perish in the sixth.
While they are going through the stages, they run into the bullies, players of the football team who were all made into registered sex offenders because of Jack, dressed as the school’s mascot, leading their nude run to the police department’s “Bring Your Daughter To Work Day” event at the beginning of the semester. This is why the whole school hates Jack. Plus, there’s an evil team of RAs led by Blake, who is most likely a sociopath. He leads the RAs around the building and starts checking dorms for drugs and alcohol. If a student was found with any substances, their phone would be taken away so Blake could assign them to a dorm four hours away from campus. A death sentence, if you will.
So yes, this movie is absolutely insane.
I have no idea what the writers were on when creating the story of this movie, but weirdly enough, it was actually entertaining. I remember seeing the trailer for it and being like, “What has Hollywood come to?” But the trailer was a complete misrepresentation of the movie, in my opinion. It went from rolling my eyes to being unable to look away from the screen.
It actually was a good-looking movie, too. One of the phases, the one where your head blows up if you say a bad word, including crimble sauce, featured heads exploding that were actually not super fake-looking. Obviously, it was done post-production–other than the splashes of blood hitting either Jack or Montgomery as they fail time and time again– but still. The dorm setting itself, where most of the movie takes place, was really well set up, too. If that were a building on campus, that would be the new Pondside.
The comedy in this movie is also so random that it’s hilarious. The beginning’s a little slow, but as soon as those drugs come into play, it blossoms into a completely off-the-rails comedy that I couldn’t stop laughing at. But it’s an absolute must to have some pizza while eating it, just in case the Tic-Tacs you ate earlier weren’t what you thought they were.
My friends and I watched it purely to see how bad it was, but we were surprised by the craziest twist of expectations of all time, both in plot, story and quality. At least I was. I laughed a lot at this movie, purely at how ridiculous the plot was and how it was amazingly executed far past my expectations. Plus, Gaten Matarazzo, a.k.a. Dustin from “Stranger Things,” pulled his character off in a way that made me separate him from the series, which he is really known for. The trailer made it look like something obnoxious and cheesy (forgive the pun), but I think it’s honestly one of my favorites. Maybe I just have bad taste, but this is a see-it-to-believe-it kind of movie.
Hayley Doda can be contacted at
hayley@kscequinox.com
