BIG CITY PIZZA
dir. Dusty Saunders
2026 • 80 minutes
CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW
by: Ben Kaye at BenKayeWords
I’ll give director Dusty Saunders this; I didn’t think I’d ever see a film where I, as the audience, looking from the vantage point of a skeleton, would receive a blowjob on a penis resembling an even tinier skeleton. The guy’s got imagination for days, which isn’t nothing, I suppose. Indeed, the ambition of Saunders’ project is laudatory; BIG CITY PIZZA is animated in real-time in one continuous shot from the perspective of Boney, the film’s sarcastic skeletal protagonist. Saunders is also, incredibly, the only credited animator for the project, a titanic and impressive undertaking given the manic imagery given to us here.
However, the valley between an idea in theory and in practice is gargantuan, and BIG CITY PIZZA’s modus operandi starts to feel tired at feature length (even at a scant 80-minute runtime). One is often put in the mind of a Let’s Play videogame walkthrough, a mode of entertainment that can leave much to be desired from the audience, a spectator divorced from the joy of actively engaging with what’s happening onscreen, and what is happening onscreen here seems to be a lethal mix of High Maintenance meets Aqua Teen Hunger Force meets HARDCORE HENRY.
As eclectic as Saunder’s designs can be - jittery environments populated by talking sharks, pigs, and comically-proportioned female characters - Saunder’s idea of humor leaves a lot to be desired, with goofy designs, silly voices, and awkward sexual encounters providing most of the meat here, the “weirdness” factor attempting to overcompensate for a thin, episodic plot about delivering pizzas across a city on the brink of its own destruction (mainly due to the impending “Omniball Championship,” glimpsed briefly whenever Boney takes a peek at his phone). For lack of a better way to sum it up, Saunders is a talented cook who, on this go-around, has given us something sadly underbaked.