I have always believed there are two types of high-school experiences. There are the ones you see in movies, where everyone is always cool, effortlessly social and somehow always at the right party. And then there are the rest of us. The ones who spent Friday nights not at football games (unless we had to, because we were in the band), but gathered around a table covered in character sheets, dice and way too many Mountain Dews and Hot Pockets.

I very much fell into that second category.

I was the nerdy kid who lived in comic book shops and video game worlds more than I did in the actual hallways of school. While other people were worrying about who was dating who, I was trying to figure out if my smuggler could talk his way out of trouble in a weekly Star Wars Roleplaying Game session. My social circle was small, but it was loyal, and honestly, those nights rolling dice and arguing over ridiculous in-game decisions are some of the best memories I have from that time.

That feeling of being just slightly outside the “main story” of school life is exactly what Pizza Movie taps into, right from the start.

Pizza Movie is a stoner comedy from writer-director-producers Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney that fully embraces chaos and then somehow finds a way to crank it up even further. The story follows two best friends and college roommates, Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone). Jack is the reckless, dive-headfirst-into-bad-decisions type, while Montgomery is more reserved, the kind of guy who looks like he regrets agreeing to things about five seconds after they happen.

That regret kicks in fast when the two stumble across a mysterious tin filled with a drug called M.I.N.T.S., and, looking for an escape from the stress of college life, they take it without a second thought.

What follows is a night of increasingly bizarre hallucinations where reality bends, breaks and occasionally just gives up, entirely. They soon discover there is only one “cure” for what they have taken: pizza, by the delivery robot named the Snackatron 3000.

Their quest turns into a surreal odyssey filled with absurd challenges, including a game where saying a single curse word comes with explosive consequences, a showdown with Blake (Jack Martin), the over-the-top RA who exists purely to torment them and a string of encounters that force them to face their worst nightmares in the weirdest ways possible.

By the end of the night, the only real question is whether they come out of it changed, or just more confused than when they started.

There is genuine talent on display here, even if the film does not always deserve it.

Matarazzo and Giambrone have a genuine, lived-in chemistry that makes Jack and Montgomery feel like people who have actually known each other for years, and that believability gives the film an emotional anchor it would otherwise be missing entirely. The film also deserves credit for its commitment to its own internal logic. The rules of the M.I.N.T.S. trip are established early and followed consistently, which gives the absurdity a structure to hang itself on.

And occasionally, when the jokes land, they really land. The curse word game is a highlight. It is tense, funny and inventive in a way that hints at the smarter movie hiding just beneath the surface.

Here is where Pizza Movie loses me: The premise is genuinely inspired, and for a while, the film rides that inspiration with real confidence. But somewhere around the midpoint, the chaos stops feeling like a deliberate creative choice and starts feeling like a substitute for one. Joke after joke gets stacked on top of the last, each one more frantic than what came before, until the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

It is the comedy equivalent of someone explaining why something is funny. The more they explain it, the less funny it becomes.

Even Matarazzo and Giambrone cannot save the third act, which abandons whatever emotional grounding the film had built and goes fully off the rails in ways that feel more exhausting than exhilarating. Blake, the villainous RA, is a one-note joke stretched across the entire runtime, and by the end, there is nothing new left for him to do except keep showing up and yelling.

The Snackatron 3000 does get a genuinely great moment near the end, and it is exactly the kind of weird, inspired payoff the movie needed more of, but by then it feels like too little, too late.

I give Pizza Movie two out of five stars. There is a version of this film that really works, one that leans into that feeling of being on the outside looking in and uses all of its weird, chaotic ideas to build something memorable instead of just loud. And for a while, you can see glimpses of that movie, buried somewhere beneath the nonstop barrage of jokes and randomness. But much like those high school nights spent around a table rolling dice, the best moments here come from connection, not chaos.

When the film forgets that, it loses what made it interesting in the first place, and no amount of hallucinations or pizza-fueled madness can quite bring it back.