Slice is a total mess — think a slice of pizza that you piled up high with every single kind of topping you ever wanted and wondered why it was such a doughy mess. But you know what? Sometimes, those kinds of experiments in stoner cooking pay off. And after watching this movie, I felt the same way.

Let me see if I can summarize this rambling bit of wacko into one coherent sentence: In the town of Kingfisher, the truce between the living and the dead is endangered by the murders of several delivery people from Perfect Pizza. There are also witches and werewolves. And a lot of the movie’s story is told through music videos. Oh yeah — Perfect Pizza is also the gateway to Hell.

That’s no accident — the star of the film is Chance the Rapper, who plays Dax, the aforementioned werewolf. And the direction comes from Austin Vesely, who directed several of Chance’s videos. 

Jack (Paul Scheer of How Did This Get Made?) has opened Perfect Pizza over the ashes of the Yummy Yummy Chinese Food restaurant, which was destroyed, and also above the previous ashes of an insane asylum which became a haunted burial ground that is currently inhabited by around 40,000 ghosts. Sean (director Vesely) is killed at the beginning of the film, bringing his girlfriend Astrid (Zazie Beetz, Deadpool 2) back to the shop she thought she left behind.

Is Dax the werewolf the killer? How does Big Cheese and his gang fit in? Is that a zombie working in the pizza shop? How awesome is it to see Hannibal Buress and Chris Parnell in a horror movie? Is this a film audacious enough to have a reporter write her story aloud to help bring all the threads together moments before the film quite literally goes to hell?

This movie is like a 1970’s Fourth World Kirby comic, in that it has 82 million ideas that it tries to fit into 82 minutes. The town of Kingfisher is fascinating — who becomes a ghost? Who becomes a zombie? Why do the witches hare everyone? Why is the occult drawn to take out? This would have worked so much better as a Netflix series, but I’m really just saying that because I wish we had more time to explore the setting and characters, like how Dax doesn’t want to be a hero or villain, but must finally make a choice.

So many of the reviews I’ve read have really taken this movie to task for being unfocused and all over the place. That’s probably why I liked it so much! I’d rather have a movie packed with big ideas and pure craziness than something that bores me.

You can find Slice on Amazon Prime.