ROGER CORMAN and CHEESE, part I: "School Spirit" and Freschetta Naturally Rising Crust Pepperoni

Welcome to the inaugural entry in our new series in which we get a frozen pizza from the grocery store and watch a Roger Corman movie while we eat it. In his 70-year career, Corman worked on approximately 500 films - as a director, a producer, and distributor, an actor, and sometimes in some secret uncredited capacity, and it is that lengthy library from which we choose, and hopefully we find just the right pie to perfectly pair with the picture. 

For this first installment we started soft: a College Sex Comedy from 1985 called School Spirit. Tom Nolan plays Billy, a college jock who gets killed in a car accident during a late night condom run. Once his soul leaves the operating table he meets up with the ghost of his dead uncle, and through a long stretch of exposition that we didn't really pay close attention to, Billy is granted some extra time on Earth - long enough to engage in the "Hog Day" party that closes out the film. So as a ghost, Billy can still walk around and interact verbally and physically as though he's alive, but he retains the power to make himself invisible, granting him access to girls' dorms and locker rooms and even harassing his pompous nerdy nemesis by dumping his lunch and tying his shoes together. These hijinks are the marrow of the movie, but they don't become monotonous (sadly) because there's a whole lotta plot forced in about Billy finding true love and the college receiving money and how that's being jeopardized - all leading up to the big party climax that features a topless slip 'n' slide and some dazzling optical effects that add an extra thirty bucks to the production value. It gets real dull in the middle, but it starts and finishes with a lotta energy. The cast is mostly likable even when the characters aren't: the standouts are Marta Kober (from Friday the 13th Part 2) as the dean's daughter, and Brian Frishman whose pleasantly chill disposition places him amongst the ranks of Jeff Spicoli, Bill S. Preston, and Michelangelo. Roughly 20 minutes into the movie we forget entirely that Billy is a ghost, largely because he's just another character in the cast and it's rarely addressed. Still, it's a more compelling story about the afterlife than Beetlejuice 2.

We've fallen for "rising crust" before and just took whatever they gave us - but this shit was risen; we can usually put away one pizza each but these were bulky enough to make it a struggle. The consistency was airy and a little like school lunch pizza but not in the best way: slightly too dry and coagulated. Also the edges burned while the center remained underdone. Nevertheless, nostalgia wields its sorcery and magically moistens our mozzarella just enough to put a smile of reminiscence on our face, and suddenly we're in the 1980s eating reheated pepperoni and watching a movie with, like, a hundred boobs in it. 

The Movie: C+

The Pizza: B