All Hail the 2026 Stoner Movie!

I saw the title and read the logline — “college kids take an insane drug and embark on an epic quest … to get pizza” — and I knew instantly that Pizza Movie was a stoner flick. It doesn’t take a genius. And honestly, my first thought was, “Gen Z is gonna take a stab at their own versions of Dude, Where’s My Car? and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle? Good luck!” I could not have been more skeptical.

But maybe it was half a bottle of wine (I don’t do stoned), or maybe I was just in the mood for some trippy, nonsensical insanity, but I have to say: As much as Pizza Movie owes a debt to the generations of stoner movies that came before it, it’s honestly a rip-roaring, idiotic good time. If I were 23, baked off my ass, and hanging out with friends of a similar disposition, Pizza Movie is exactly the movie I’d want to see in the common room of my dorm on a Friday night.

Is it good? I might stop short of that. But it’s fun, and it does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to keep a generation of kids too high to get off the couch completely entertained. What else can you ask for? It has pizza, it has exploding heads, a diaper-wearing Grinch, Sarah Sherman, chainsaw-wielding rat kings, and a big heart. It gets the job done. Whatever expectations one might have for a stoner-buddy comedy in 2026, Pizza Movie surpasses them, and then some.

The setup: Jack (Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Giambrone) are two loser-ish college roommates hanging out one night. They’ve been socially ostracized and bullied by the popular kids — represented by Logan (Marcus Scribner, Black-ish), who pins them down and farts in their faces (it is not an intellectual movie). Jack finds some drugs in the dorm room, convinces Montgomery to take them, and afterward discovers that they’re very powerful psychedelics and — as explained in a video by the drug maker and former occupant of the dorm room (Sarah Sherman) — involve a number of phases, each worse than the last, ending with rat kings, uh, anally penetrating them with chainsaws.

The only way to avoid the side effects, alas, is to eat pizza. And thus begins their epic quest to obtain a pizza, which proves to be far more difficult than it should be in a college dorm. They are eventually joined by Lizzy (Lulu Wilson), a college student who used to be their friend but abandoned them for the popular kids, who only use her for her daddy’s credit card. And that’s basically it, other than having to avoid an RA transferring them to an undesirable dorm that’s four hours away from campus for some reason.

Does it make sense? Not a lick. Is it coherent? Barely. Is there a phase where their heads explode anytime they use a profanity? Yes. Does Daniel Radcliffe provide the voice of a butterfly? He does. Is there a folk-punk band that sounds like cats in a sack being banged against a wall? Absolutely. There’s even a bit of Superbad here, plus the characters nonsensically interact with the writers of the movie at one point because why not?

I am decidedly not the demographic for Pizza Movie, and it should be a movie I could barely tolerate. But it’s a surprisingly fun, very dumb, and appropriately timed (97 minutes) comedy.