I usually shy away from trying to explain too much in the introduction, but nothing I say here isn’t already in the two-minute-long trailer. Matter of fact, you could watch the trailer and get almost the same result as watching the full movie.
“Pizza Movie” (2026) is an American film directed by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, released straight to streaming on Hulu. Starring Gaten Matarazzo a la “Stranger Things,” Sean Giambrone and Lulu Wilson, the movie follows three college students during a frenzied night after they take psychedelics, with a twist: if you don’t eat pizza, you will have a chainsaw shoved up your rear end by your worst personal nightmare. Dodging resident advisors, encountering crushes and discovering themselves, the characters’ journeys are long on this path to retrieve a single slice.
“Pizza Movie” is supposed to be a surreal comedy that dives into the psyche of the tripped-out mind. Does it do that? Nah. I mean, kinda.
Let’s talk about the comedy for a minute. I’ve said before that comedy is usually a weak genre, only bolstered by a similarly added genre like romance, but there are still many good comedy movies out there. “Office Space” (1999) comes to mind because of its ability to capture the American work culture so succinctly that it becomes a commentary on society, like most great comedies.
Then there are projects like “Pizza Movie,” which doesn’t dare to say anything at all. We call things like this a nothingburger.
The setting of a college campus alone presents many opportunities to comment on academic culture, dorm culture, the institutionalization of it all. Instead, this is passed up for a case of millennial humor that’s gone wildly extinct. Every single line is a joke, and less than three-quarters of them land anywhere further than an amused huff. Not to mention, any joke that is made stays way longer than it’s welcome.
You know when you have an acquaintance, you run into them out and about and you enjoy them in small doses, until they start following you wherever you’re going, and it just gets kind of annoying but not enough that it’s actually a problem? It’s like that.
They also attempt to use a lot of editing for the humor. This movie has like one gimmick, and it’s saying that they’re not going to do something, but then they immediately do it. It’s kind of funny the first time, but it gets annoying. Also, editing-wise, this movie is 97 minutes long, and the third act alone feels like an hour. Fix your pacing, “Pizza Movie.”
The surrealist aspects are fine. They’re extremely derivative, but so are the jokes, and also the characters, and the style and also everything else.
I can’t hate this movie, though, because it’s really just fine. The humor never landed with me, but it doesn’t do anything technically wrong. The acting is fitting, and the tone is consistent. It’s just Hulu slop.
Go watch Gaten Matarazzo’s trailer on Instagram for this, though. It’s funnier than the movie.