Gaten Matarazzo in a Goofy Bad-Trip Comedy

If your first thought on encountering a movie called “Pizza Movie” is that it’s form of a dumb title, don’t fear: Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher‘s antic, frantic comedy is way ahead of you. Late in proceedings, a haphazard fourth-wall break throws us to the pair of writer-directors at their desk, agreeing with each other that the title isn’t proper, nevertheless it’s also only short-term. “Forgetting” to alter it, after all, is certainly one of many missed particulars and sloppy errors that “Pizza Movie” feigns in its quest for chaotic stoner-movie cultdom — a “Dude, Where’s My Car?” for the Zoomer period, for better or worse or, ideally, each.

There’s an ironic challenge in retooling this style for a technology famously more straight-edge than its residing predecessors, though McElhaney and Kocher — nothing if not self-aware, as seasoned purveyors of web sketch comedy — are on top of that, too. The stoners in this stoner film are naively unintended ones, tricked into a baroque nightmare of a drug journey by a dusty box of unidentified drugs, while their improbably sophisticated mission is to retrieve the freshly delivered pizza that will make the dangerous high go away.

Compounding the relative wholesomeness is the casting of erstwhile “Stranger Things” moppet Gaten Matarazzo as the most gung-ho (and top-billed) of our hapless trippers: Calling “Pizza Movie” his first grown-up position can be a sore betrayal of the movie’s proudly juvenile rules, however nonetheless, his spirited performance right here reveals potentialities past the YA realm. His buoyant, good-natured buddy act with co-star Sean Giambrone — also a baby-faced former little one actor, with Disney Channel credentials to subvert — is the most interesting asset of a romp that pinballs manically between fairly humorous and fairly tiresome, which is just about the thought. College-age viewers in numerous states of inebriation will possible forgive the movie its inconsistencies when it lands on Hulu next month, following an SXSW premiere.

Jack (Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Giambrone) are amiably dorky school roommates whose friendship is strengthened by shared outcast standing: Everyone else in their dorm regards them as losers, while they’re common targets for high school-level bullying by the alpha jocks on campus. Among the latter’s clique is secretly nerdy blonde Lizzie (Lulu Wilson), who used to hold out with Jack and Montgomery, before proving fairly and canny sufficient to change allegiances. A typical Friday evening, then, sees the guys sheltering from social disgrace in their room, when a probability discovery of the aforementioned drugs — hidden by the room’s kooky former resident, performed by “Saturday Night Live’s” Sarah Sherman — livens issues up significantly.

Cue numerous phases of hallucinatory hijinks, from physique swaps to exploding heads to a time-loop setpiece lifted immediately from “Groundhog Day.” McElhaney and Kocher’s script fires gags so quickly and indiscriminately at the viewers that it hardly issues how many are stolen, or how many don’t land in any respect. One barely has time to clock that it’s Daniel Radcliffe voicing Montgomery’s surreally empowered pet butterfly before “Pizza Movie” dives into yet another short-term actuality shift, or a “clowncore vomit opera” musical quantity, or a surprisingly clever silhouette-based animated interlude detailing the grim destiny of a neighboring dorm.

There’s a whisper of a plot connecting these scattershot concepts and pictures — in addition to the endlessly sidetracked pizza-collection journey, our heroes must fight a mass eviction scheme by the dorm’s vindictive chief RA (Jack Martin) — yet even that feels extreme as the movie saunters to 97 minutes. (A modest runtime, definitely, but when something calls for to be an 80-minute throwaway, it’s this.)

Story is beside the point of this exercise, which is basically the absence of any point in any respect. A touch of romance between Montgomery and unexpectedly receptive cool woman Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is dangled before being wilfully scuppered; if he and Jack study something from their ordeal, it’s never to danger something out of the extraordinary again, as “Pizza Movie” lastly emerges as paean to the staid pleasures of takeout and staying in.

In their first feature outing after years of sketch work for “Saturday Night Live,” Comedy Central and FunnyOrDie, among others, McElhaney and Kocher (collectively recognized in comedy circles at BriTANick) don’t precisely stretch past their affinity for short-form work. This is nothing if not a movie of fragments, alternately raucous and off-target. But the sheer relentlessness of its joke-cracking bodes nicely for future, riskier enterprises — as, for that matter, does the pure spark between Matarazzo’s repeatedly foiled would-be swagger and Giambrone’s disarming mama’s-boy act. “Pizza Movie” is disposable, virtually by design, however it might have occurred upon a comedian duo price reteaming.