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 that lane ran out.
“I’ve always found that at least my experience being high on weed, I’m not seeing anything crazy,” Kocher said. “I’m definitely thinking weird thoughts, but it’s more like I get anxiety from the weed more than anything else.” He went on to say that when they first started developing the idea, weed and cocaine didn’t really offer the same comic possibilities as the shrooms or acid material. “We had a lot of fun with the characters being really high,” he said of older weed comedies, “but I feel like a lot of those jokes have been done.”
It feels less like a rejection of the stoner comedy canon, and more like a reckoning with its limits.
The classic stoner comedy was always lying a little. Weed got depicted as visually chaotic, full of hallucinations and distortions, when the real experience is much more interior, more paranoid, less cinematic. Kocher even joked that when he first did shrooms, his immediate thought was: “This is how weed has been depicted in movies.”
That’s part of what makes Pizza Movie feel interesting. It takes the exaggeration the genre always smuggled in, removes the pretense and just commits to it completely.
Do I Take the Dorm Room Mystery Drugs? Probably Yes.
Rather than anchor the movie to any one real substance, McElhaney and Kocher invented their own.
“When we started talking about this film,” McElhaney said, “the things we wanted to do are things that really aren’t indicative of any drug. They’re just wild things.”
The trip unfolds in phases, each one mutating the genre it’s currently inhabiting. Absurd one moment, edging toward horror the next, then snapping back into comedy, into something almost tender, before you’ve decided how to feel.
Kocher puts it plainly: “If we can make you feel something emotional in the middle of a fart joke, that’s a massive win for us.”
It sounds chaotic on paper, but it mirrors something true about psychedelics: that particular swing between terror and laughter, between the profound and the ridiculous, is part of the texture of a real trip. One minute, everything means everything. The next minute, your brain is trying to digest itself. Then suddenly you’re laughing-crying on the kitchen floor at the absurdity of being a person.
The tonal whiplash is part of both the joke and the design. For a younger audience raised on faster cuts, harder pivots and a more elastic relationship to genre, that rhythm likely feels more natural than the slower burn of older stoner comedies.
Kocher described the pace simply: “We wanted it to feel like a freight train.” It does. Ninety minutes evaporate, but the movie never loses you.
A Cast That Gets the Assignment
The cast helps keep all of this from flying completely off the rails.
Matarazzo gives Jack a sweet, slightly panicked core that keeps the film emotionally legible even when the world around him is actively dissolving. Giambrone’s Montgomery is awkward, overeager and brittle enough to make each new horror feel like it might actually break him. Together, they sell the friendship and the anxiety underneath it: two young guys still in the process of becoming.
McElhaney and Kocher said both characters pull from different pieces of who they were at that age, which, if you were ever nineteen, you recognize. “Trying to find your group,” McElhaney said. “Trying to find comfort in the things you like to do and feel that they’re cool even if you think they’re not.” That uncertainty gives the film a real emotional floor, something it can return to after it detonates its own ceiling.
Lulu Wilson, Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Marcus Scribner fill out the college ecosystem without making it feel like a stock campus comedy. Sarah Sherman adds just the right touch of comic frequency she’s known for as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. And then there’s Daniel Radcliffe, voicing an aggressively unhinged butterfly with the kind of total, unconditional commitment this movie requires from everyone in it.
Kocher recalled that when they reached out through mutual friends, Radcliffe came back with “an immediate and enthusiastic, hell yes, I will play the butterfly in your movie.” McElhaney added that Radcliffe was willing to try the voice every possible way and kept worrying he wasn’t doing enough, which is pretty remarkable given that simply being Daniel Radcliffe and voicing a foul-mouthed butterfly named Lysander already feels like more than enough.
The commitment is the joke, and also the craft, and you can’t separate them. That’s what makes Pizza Movie sing.
The Come-Up Looks Good From Here
That kind of commitment doesn’t come out of nowhere. McElhaney and Kocher have spent the last two decades building toward it. As the sketch duo BriTANicK, they developed a style that runs on escalation, genre-hopping, and absolute commitment to the absurd. Instincts that landed them in writers’ rooms for SNL and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and now fuel their jump into features.
They met at NYU, came up through live shows and internet comedy, and spent years refining the muscle memory this movie flexes. Much of that time, Kocher said, felt like “making secret art.”
You can feel those years in every scene. The movie bends the bit without ever breaking it.
It’s also landing at the right moment. Alongside Pizza Movie, the duo has Over Your Dead Body arriving this same month, two projects dropping simultaneously after years of building toward something bigger. Kocher called it “exciting and overwhelming but mostly just great.” Nothing about this film feels tentative. It feels like two comedy lifers finally getting the runway to go as far as they want.
That’s what makes Pizza Movie land as more than a string of gags. The old blueprint is still there. This one just lets it hallucinate a little harder.
“Pizza Movie”
Synopsis: A shy college student and his reckless roommate set out on a simple mission to grab pizza, but after a strange dose of a mind-bending experimental drug, they’re thrust into a chaotic night of absurd encounters, wild hallucinations and unexpected revelations that could change their lives forever.
Cast: Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone, Lulu Wilson, Jack Martin, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Marcus Scribner, Caleb Hearon, Sarah Sherman, Justin Cooley, Kevin Matthew Reyes, Adam Herschman and Lucas Zelnick.
Credits: The film is produced by American High’s Jeremy Garelick and Will Phelps and All Things Comedy’s Billy Rosenberg. Jason Zaro, Molle DeBartolo and Max Butler are also producers. Gaten Matarazzo is an executive producer. The film is written and directed by Brian McElhaney & Nick Kocher.
