Pizza Movie was added to Hulu (Disney+ internationally) in April, joining a huge list of new movies coming to theaters and the best streaming services. You might not have heard of this one, but now that you have, I'm going to explain why you should check it out.
I stumbled across Pizza Movie on the Hulu homepage, and while it would usually be the kind of thing I'd scroll past, a familiar face caught my eye. Yes, Stranger Things icon Gaten Matarazzo is in the lead role here, and a far cry from Dustin Henderson, a character who gained him a lot of recognition.
This time, he's not on a quest in the Upside Down, but rather a quest to get pizza after his character Jack takes an experimental drug with his friend Montgomery (Sean Giambrone). As it happens, pizza is the only way to counteract the hallucinatory effects of the drugs, so this is a serious case of the munchies.
Check out the trailer before to see just how surreal this story gets.
Pizza Movie shouldn't be good, but somehow it is
Given its name and silly concept, it's easy to write this movie off as being bad. Pizza Movie definitely opens itself up to some unfair judgment at face value, but I'm encouraging you to give it a go. It even has a 76% Rotten Tomatoes score, which came as a surprise.
There was even a meme in response to the trailer, with The Hollywood Reporter sharing the directors' response to the relentless "I'm good bro" jokes in the comments section. At least they were good sports about it!
But with a 90-minute runtime, it's the kind of easy watch that's much needed after a long day of work, or if you want some lighthearted weekend entertainment. It's the perfect length for a comedy movie, with a straightforward narrative encouraging you to switch your brain off.
I watch a lot of intense things, like my round-up of this month's best horror movies, so it was nice to have a break and watch a surreal movie about two friends trying to get pizza while having wild hallucinations along the way.
There's a great supporting cast here, like Saturday Night Live's Bobby Moynihan, who voices a food delivery robot, and Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a butterfly. Yes, you read that right. Once again, I'm impressed at how he chooses the most out there roles possible; you never know where he's going to go next.
While Matarazzo definitely steals the show here, he's supported by an excellent cast who torments him on his quest to get pizza, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write.
Pizza Movie is good fun and not to be taken too seriously. And in a world where everything can feel a bit too heavy, there's nothing wrong with some silly escapism every now and then.
