June 15, 2026
I've watched quite a few excellent movies lately. Movies which exhibited "clarity of purpose" and largely achieved that purpose with subtlety and technical acumen. The Pizzagate Massacre is not one of them. It has a 5.0 audience score on IMDB. The director previously worked mostly on music videos. I watched it with my brother on the free streaming service Tubi.
Do you remember Pizzagate? The conspiracy theory that arose in 2016 from 4channers reading the hacked emails of Clinton aide John Podesta and deciding that discussions about where to order pizza from were in fact about trafficking child sex slaves? It culminated in a South Carolina man travelling to D.C. with an AR-15, firing 3 shots inside local pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong, and demanding that the child sex slaves be released from a secret basement there. Buffoonish stuff, and an indicator that being normal in America was about to become very unfashionable. Within the next few years, a user with the handle QAnon would start posting cryptic messages on 4chan, Alex Jones would accuse the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting of being paid actors, and John Valley would start writing a movie script. The Comet Ping Pong shooter was arrested, tried, served time in prison, and was released in May of 2020 before the movie he inspired was the following October.
The Pizzagate Massacre wants to be a ripped-from-the-headlines "social satire," but Valley also really wanted to make a grindhouse horror-comedy B-movie. Like every horror movie that's "based on true events," it plays very loose with the facts, keeping almost nothing except the word "pizzagate" and the emotional core of the theory that the people that run the world do their dark deeds in pizza restaurants. The internet is practically non-existent here. Instead the theory is disseminated by a local television station in the director's home state of Texas. Here, right-wing conspiracy theories aren't the hobby of isolated shut-ins; they're the default mode of political thought for much of the population. One of our protagonists, Duncan Plump, is a member of a Christian nationalist militia. He has the aim and instincts of a Call of Duty character, and we soon learn that he was the son of Waco's own David Koresh. Duncan looks kind of like a guy you might find at a Warhammer 40K tournament. He is enlisted to investigate the pizza restaurant (relocated to Austin) by an endearingly genuine aspiring documentarian named Karen Black. She apparently got into conspiracy theories through the moon landing. Karen Black is Black.
Did I mention the purported budget was less than $100,000? This evidently didn't allow for reshoots. The script is glued together with a continuous voiceover, and the most crucial scene of the movie, the massacre itself, is conspicuously not shown. The obvious implication is that they had planned an extravagantly gory shootout, only to find that they wouldn't be allowed to film inside the restaurant and also lacked the funds to find another location or build a set. The result is charming and mystifying.
The true weirdness of the movie is revealed when you try to make out the message that it's yelling at you. What are the movie's politics? I'm convinced Valley is a lib. One of the film's clearer targets is Alex Jones, with a stand-in character that accurately mirrors him as a cynical grifter who holds his most devoted fans in contempt. Its those fans that are the difficult part. They're the "white working class" that the New York Times and The Atlantic did interviews of in 2016, the credulous dopes that make up the hard base of Trump's support. In this movie, they're animated by fantastical stories about lizard people, not racial fear. Well, some of them are. But most of them aren't. They're just confused. Duncan and Karen get into an argument over the meaning of the confederate flag. Duncan apparently never realized that the flag was racist, and Karen apparently never realized that Christian nationalist militia members were racist. Duncan's not racist though. In a scene so contrived and self-serious it's unintentionally comical, Duncan shamefully reveals a swastika chest tattoo to an elderly Black couple whose home he's broken into and insists he's changed. Circumstances have conspired to make him the scapegoat for the villains of the world. What are we doing here? What are we saying? As satire it just doesn't work for me.
The most effective part of the movie is the suppressed romance between our protagonists. Here we can identify some extant part of the American psyche. Like all Americans, Duncan and Karen have beliefs that bear no relationship to the real world. They are both socially maladjusted freaks that live in a personally curated reality that they share with no one but each other. Unable to truly connect, each finds their feelings vascillate between tender care, fascination, and mistrust. If they hadn't taken the easy way out by making Karen a passive damsel in distress and Duncan an improbable action hero towards the end, their relationship could probably have made this movie genuinely good.
Anyway, watch The Sweet East, directed by Sean Price Williams, which also features a Pizzagate pastiche.