Pizza Shop: The Movie
Independent comedies have a long history of sink or swim. The stellar ones, such as Kevin Smith’s timeless piece Clerks, are cemented as cult classics in our every expanding history of laughs and giggles. There are bad ones too like recent Local Legends that pummel their budget into little chortles and dead cricket sounds. George Obarts’ Pizza Shop: The Movie took to the realms of the internet in order to fund it’s mad-hap and gross-out comedy with the hopes that it would fall on the former side of indie flicks. However, can Obarts pull off an incredible film on such a miniscule budget?
Relying on the dregs of customers that fulfil the lives of the works at Pizza Shop. Not only that, but the lowly employee must venture out and get cornered but all sorts of crazy characters. Naturally, the job is a dead end. And to make matters worse, there is a constant battle between the employees. On one side there is company man Pete, who is enthusiastic about his job much to the annoyance of slacker Jason. The battle of wits comes to ahead but will there be something leaving at the end of the film, who will survive? And will you ever look at pizza the same way?
There is no denying that there is an idea, passion and some form of an idea. However the execution is poor and it’s not merely down the monetary restraints. For a start, those who like off colour and gross out comedies may enjoy this, but the film throws you straight into it. There is no enriching development or formal introduction before you are forced to watch shit being thrown into a pizza within the first five minutes. What, from what I can gather, should be a laugh out loud shock is just cringey, setting the entire tone for the movie that can never quite recover. Its toilet humour but never in a smart or clever way so it’s sickening.
It doesn’t help that Pizza Shop: The Movie has such a horrid collection of terrible acting. Though Obarts shots and shaky set up can be boiled down to the budget, the extent of skill from the actors are just abysmal. I’m not here to point one out and drag them down because the entire cast ham handed their way through the script, butchering it with every line that you’ll wince at each delivery. There are extended pauses, awful dialogues and this dullness that runs through all of them that make them unbelievable characters.
Look, there is a time and a place for graceless sickening films and comedy. And somewhere there is possibly a collection of people who will laugh at this. It’s almost like Obarts’ story is trying too hard to be Clerks and American Pie mixed together and the entire affair suffers. Rather than developing the story, which at its simplest core is genuinely quite interesting, it relies on whackiness that is not big or clever. I am sure Obarts has other ideas or possibly better direction that we can feast upon later in his career. But this is like food poisoning.