Big City Pizza (2026): Popcorn Frights Review

Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 (unless you get squeamish with sexual content)
Written and Directed by Dusty Saunders

Adult animation can be a wild, confusing ride. Big City Pizza shoots for the moon and hits a bullseye with its hypnotic and amusing slice of pizza life. We follow skeleton delivery man Boney and his wild adventures delivering Big City Pizzas. It threatens to be too weird to watch, as it dances right on the edge of being too artsy. We’ve all been there with independent animation films, particularly in this genre. However, the pacing is perfect, and it is filled with raunchy, hysterical moments with wonderfully colorful characters. I had a blast with this film, which played on the Popcorn Frights Streaming Program.

While big studio animated films feel like they are generated by focus groups for the broadest laughs, indie animated films often take the opposite approach. Independent animated films are highly personal efforts. They are the ultimate expressions of artistic intent, and often times they feel like watching somebody’s art school thesis project. Occasionally, you will run into the labor of love that takes advantage of the wild possibilities of the animated form, and it takes you on a ride into your dreams. For me, that’s Big City Pizza. To be fair, this isn’t much of a horror film. However, monstrous characters populate the city, and the film features some comic grisly animated deaths. So, we’ll say this is horror adjacent. It isn’t trying to be scary. Weird? Hell yes. Terrifying? Perhaps if you just dropped an acid tab.

The whole movie should come with a visual warning. The film vibrates constantly, shimmering with a strange pulsing, breathing vitality. Initially the flickering lights distracted me. My brain eventually adjusted and I let the visuals wash over me. This is computer animation, but stylistically it reads like claymation. There is a real soft tangible quality to the characters. The scenery feels like cardboard cutouts at times, and like miniatures at others.

Big City Pizza mostly plays as a continuous unbroken POV shot from the perspective of our protagonist, Boney. We rarely see Boney in total, but we get a glimpse of his skeletal anatomy (sometimes to hysterical effect) as if we were playing a first person video game. Dusty Sanders drew from a motley collection of Big City oddballs to receive the pizzas, and we spend just enough time for them to build layers of strange behavior that makes for a memorable evening for Boney. Big City feels like NYC from the 1970s. It’s nasty, but in a fun way. We’re happy to be exploring this skeevy city as we travel door to door delivering pies.

The Voice Cast of Big City Pizza:

• Boney, voiced by Sean Barrie, is a hard smoking working stiff, who has a crush on his colleague Mia. He’s been working for Big City Pizza for a long time. He’s a lifer. Or… after-lifer.
• Mia, voiced by Ali Graba, is the pretty daughter of The Bossman, owner of Big City Pizza. She’s a waitress and does much of the hard work for the Pizzaria.
• The Bossman, voiced by Samuel Welchel, is a second generation pizza man. His mother’s secret sauce is the source of the pizzaria’s success. He constantly harps on Boney to keep up with the orders. He’s a bit of a mob boss in attitude.
• Oracle Bill, voiced by Cory Vent, the pizza shaman. The Bossman recently hired Bill, to enchant the pizza sauce. He also is eager to make a move on Mia.
• Chef is voiced by Elijah Rawling; the pie maker is close with Boney.
• The Fortune Teller is voiced by Kristin Politis. She sees romance in Boney’s near future.
• Scarlett, voiced by Monisha Dadlani, is a dominatrix who wants Boney to feed her piggy supplicant pizza.
• Wilbur, voiced by Jacob Schaer, is Scarlett’s unwilling pig captive.
• Carlotte, voiced by Rebecca Mead, is a medusa having a romantic break-up breakdown. She ordered a pizza while doing her laundry.
• Cletus, voiced by Bryce Platz, is a mad scientist cowboy whose crazy elixir teleports Boney into his wildest fantasies… and nightmares. Oh, and he ordered a pizza.

Note: All of the voices were done by Dusty Saunder’s friends… for free!

A Summary of Big City Pizza

It is the evening of the Omniball championship between the Beavers and the Clams, and The Big City is abuzz with anticipation. It’s a fine time to be ordering pizzas, and Big City Pizza is ready to take your order. Boney feeds Big Stinky, his cat, and prepares himself for a long night of pizza deliveries. He meanders past his menangerie of odd neighbors on his way to work. When he arrives he awkwardly flirts with Mia, who is taking out the trash, and then The Bossman barks at him to get on is scooter and delivers those pizzas. With the new pizza shaman, Oracle Bill, on board, The Bossman is expecting a big night.

“Oracle Bill blesses the pizzas, inviting divine energy and breathes life into the sauce, that will be relocated into our customer’s hearts!”

The Bossman

Boney’s first delivery is to a Fortune Teller, who, though she doesn’t have the foresight to know that she had ordered a pizza, determines that Boney is going to have a challenge in front of him and that Romance awaits. He then returns back and delivers a pie to a complicated relationship between Scarlett and her submissive pig, Wilbur. Boney’s third delivery is to a distraught medusa in a laundromat, with murder in her heart for a lost love. Between each pick-up, Oracle Bill is doing a pick-up of his own. He’s making moves on Mia, and Boney sees his chances of romance with Mia slipping away.

And then things get really weird:

Just when Boney thought he was having a strange evening, Boney makes his next stop at a multi-story trailer park, where Cletus awaits. Cletus and his chicken Henrietta have been working on a mind-blowing concoction. Boney has had enough of weird shit for the night, but Cletus convinces him to try out his elixir. Boney imbibes from a jug, along with a slice of pizza.

Henrietta guides him into a kaleidescopic tour of his own psyche. It taps into his own fantasies of being with Mia (to some rather graphic and amusing results). The trip explores his latent desire to be a hero to a teddy bear mother who asks him to rescue her son from a claw toy vending machine. The churning dynamic of the jittery backgrounds takes on a whole new dynamic in this sequence.

After leaving Cletus’ trailer, chaos in the city erupts. A crisis is brewing at the pizzaria, as The Bossman believe somebody stole the secret sauce recipe and gave it to a rival pizza joint. The Bossman brandishes his pistol to find out just who did it. Meanwhile, the Omniball final just had a huge upset, and the City has gone into a violent looting frenzy. Boney’s wild ride has just gone very violent.

Evaluation of Big City Pizza:

Consider me impressed! I fully expected a fever dream story. Something disjointed and interpretive, like Mad God, a movie that I admired for its technical achievement and got lost in its weirdness. This, however, delivered a curious slice of life in the day of an ordinary, but skeletal, dude. Sean Berrie, in his acting debut, delivers a near-deadpan commentary that has a laid back calmness that evens out the frenzied plot that he negotiates. Each delivery has a story punch, and it moves on. The pizza provided, time to go to the next customer. It’s neatly efficient that way.

There is a story arc for Boney, as he has to reconcile his feelings. He’s a laconic slacker, by nature, which allows him to miss opportunities and get bullied around. He gets his hero’s moment though, and even though the chaos builds even past the climax, he enjoys his moment of fleeting glory. The plot is basic, though the specifics are inspired. This creates a fun vibe, and the pulsing beat of the kinetic backgrounds builds a vibe around the story always making it a little off-kilter and uncanny.

In a Q&A interview with the Chatanooga Film Festival, Saunders explains that his rationale for the unique application of the backgrounds was both artistic (for which I applaud) and practical. Working with Blender, the software used to develop the animations, the photo and artistic applications placed on the backgrounds required him to use this approach from making the backgrounds too static.

Sexual Content: (Spoiler content within)

This movie contains a couple of scenes that are highly sexualized. Boney’s trip to Cletus’ trailer dives into a kaleidescope fantasy that gets very trippy and oddly sexual. It’s a scene that probably will prevent this film from getting an R rating, and will stick in your mind for a very long time. Let’s just say Boney’s namesake comes into play. This is a through-the-looking glass moment that will answer questions that you never knew you had, and depending on how prudish you are, will either leave you disgusted or grinning from ear to ear. Me? I cackled. That was awesome.

There’s also a scene that has a riot punk whipping his junk out in his death frenzy. Aaaaand, that was a shocker. Funny, but also quite rude.

Also, apparently Saunders has taken some criticism that his female characters are highly sexualized. I would say that all of his female characters are pretty, to the point of being sexy, but this isn’t like Heavy Metal, which is a teenager’s wet dream of naked women with broadswords, or Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, an X-rated counterculture cartoon. The depictions here are no worse than you would see in a superhero comic book or manga. For some people, that might be too much, and this movie might not be for you. I tend to think those criticisms would come from audiences who may have been expecting a more intellectual artistic excercise, and likely aren’t your average horror fan, who has a threshold that this is well within. As Saunders himself describes this, he made a silly movie.

Concluding Thoughts

Perhaps this was a movie with me in mind. It entertained me from Boney’s introduction to the semi-apocalyptic ending. So, consider my ranking as a personal preference, (as you always should) but I really enjoyed it. Prepare for some jumpy visuals. Some people have gotten motion sickness with this, but again, my mind settled in with the visuals pretty quickly.

I adore the stylistic touches employed by Saunders. Even the scooter dynamic, moving through the Big City streets was creatively handled. The myriad of interesting characters, each invested with a quirky persona gave the City a personality. Characters with only seconds of screen time made an impact. Maybe they had a quippy one liner, or perhaps they just added to the vibe of a night on the edge. My favorite character was Oracle Bill, always ready with a pithy proverb, backed by manipulative intent.

If you see this at the time of the posting, this film will still be available through Popcorn Frights for $10 over the next TWO DAYS (August 16)… so if this entices you, I recommend you go to their streaming site, and check it out. Like many deep indie films, it remains to be seen how long this film stays on the festival circuit, and when it might get a streaming, or even better yet, a theatrical release. This film is not surprisingly, not rated. It certainly qualifies as an R rated film, but it even pushes that boundary a bit.

Review by Eric Li