A Little Slice of Cheese Pizza: The Pizza Man (2001)

The Pizza Man (2001)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Sara Rogere Carter, Sherman Golden and Allen Kemp

Special thanks to Junkyard Cinema back at Twitter and Youtube for sharing this rare slice of do-it-yourself slasher cinema with me. And now to flagellate myself with it because, well, I'm a sadomasochistic completist who just couldn't resist a hard-to-find title, even if it's going to be torture for my brain and eyeballs.

From what I can gather, The Pizza Man (2001) is mostly about a thug named Rico first, a killer pizza man second; the whole "story" is basically this Rico fella (who refers to himself in the third person) throwing a house party with his ghetto chums, his whiny "bee-yotch" girlfriend Sharon and two other girls who are in it for the bodycount as they smoke weed, deal crack and eat pizza. Meanwhile we got this escaped mental patient who used to be a pizza delivery man loose in the city killing people left and right with a buzzsaw on a stick, eventually making his way into crashing Rico's party.

Now, when I say The Pizza Man is a do-it-yourself horror film, I mean it is a do-it-yourself horror flick in the sense it hardly has a budget to speak of; its lack of proper lighting meant that it's incomprehensible even by grainy shot-on-video quality standards, which is made worse with the fact that the film mostly takes place at night and its last act involves a power loss. I don't know about you but I don't particularly find long scenes of flashlights wandering around exciting, nor are they gripping or worth my time. Its audio also often than not muffles out, further making a sit through of this title less of a minuscule chore and more of a suffering ordeal, one wherein its lack of budget killed off any potential of the end product being exploitatively cheeky and fun with its concept of a murderous pizza guy out stalking and slaying the people he delivers to.

Combine that with the matter that it has no real plot to work with, a direction without some shred of flair or style to it, and an editing so atrociously abrupt that it butchered the flow of the flick, then you might as well entertain yourself with a pop-up book sober as you'll certainly get more excitement out of that than this mess. Mercifully, The Pizza Man is only 48 minutes (credits included) so the suffering technically isn't too long and there is some cushion of cheese from the casts' bad acting that does make this film slightly tolerable. And by slightly, I mean I readied three cans of beer to numb my senses once I'm starting to find the film's corniness delving into annoying territories and it was dumb of me to assume I just needed three...

Bottom line, if you think you can withstand the full assault of a zero-production horror quickie like The Pizza Man (2001) and enjoy it, I'm partly worried about you but, hey, so long as you're happy! I, as a completist, do not regret seeing this as it is a rare find, but let's just say I now understand the reason behind its rarity and I think it's best to keep this one obscure.

Bodycount:

1 female ran through with a circular saw

1 female killed offscreen, later seen with a head wound

1 male beaten to death

1 female had her throat cut

1 male and 1 female killed with a circular saw

1 male found decapitated

1 male killed offscreen with a circular saw

1 male killed with a circular saw

1 male seen murdered

Total: 10