Pizza Shop The Movie
Yeah…I’m not quite sure to say about this movie. It’s a comedy about people who work at a delivery pizza shop, and the situations they find themselves in. When the director calls it an “off-color” comedy, that’s almost underselling it. All the colors of the rainbow are involved in this movie. The real question is, is it a comedy?
When it comes to vulgarity in movies (regardless of genre), I’d like to think I’m pretty open-minded. I’m a fan of Kevin Smith, the Judd Apatow camp is (mostly) in my good graces, and movies such as “Borat,” the “American Pie” movies (the first three, at least), and a handful of Will Ferrell films have found their way into my collection. But there are limits to what makes movie vulgarity funny, and “Pizza Shop The Movie” crosses it immediately. The first thing we see is an employee mixing a turd into pizza sauce for a particular customer; yeah, it’s that type of movie. It’s also a film that is broken into vignettes, with a spinning logo and singing voices splitting up the stories; that part I liked, although the movie left a bad taste in my mouth after the way it started. (Seriously, after the first couple of times the characters use the word “fisting” that’s part of the instructional video, the pun lost it’s flavor.) The question is, could the movie recover?
Actually, the movie, written and directed by George O’Barts, does recover to an extent. Instead of being just one raunchy scenario after another, which the movie is the first 3-4 segments, “Pizza Shop” starts actually being about something around the time the other delivery drivers pull a practical joke on Pete (the shop’s gung-ho customer service geek, played by Robert Bielfelt), which causes him to have an awakening. The film continues to deal in filthy humor, and honestly, it’s not very humorous, but it actually has a bit of a purpose by the time it is finishing up. It does get dark, though, but that’s actually where the film starts to get funny. The performances are rough around the edges, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t really result in genuine comedic timing. That means it has to come from the narrative, and there are times when the humor comes through, but too many times when it doesn’t. Thankfully, the story itself is enough to keep one interested up to the end, resulting in an enjoyable ending to what starts as a wild movie, but sometimes goes too far.
