Happy Valentine’s Day, folks! What better way to celebrate than with a load of cheese? Today’s entry into the Hall of Shame is an ABC Family gem about warring pizzerias. (I originally considered titling this post “Classics of the Corn: Stuffed Crust Edition.”)

TMP’s Classics of the Corn series usually features sci-fi films, horrors and the occasional overblown melodrama. Today, a completely different but equally kerneled film is joining the ranks: ABC Family’s 2005 rom-com Pizza My Heart.

(Image: kimoradilautbiru @ Blogspot)
(Image: kimoradilautbiru @ Blogspot)

I initially selected Pizza My Heart on Netflix because of the awful title. It was a late night and I was looking for something light and fun to watch before falling asleep. Pizza My Heart is a title that makes no sense at all.

If it were stylized as Pizza, My Heart one may assume it was a love letter to pizza, as in “Pizza, you own my heart!”… but there is no comma or any other clue as to what Pizza My Heart means, exactly. Is your heart made of pizza? Are you covering your heart in pizza? Is your heart on a journey to become New Jersey’s greatest pizza-maker?

Seeing the ABC Fam logo slapped on the corner of the poster also attracted me to the film. The network is known for churning out incredibly fluffy little films with less-than-award-worthy performances, and I’m known for enjoying these awful movies.

Despite the wacky title, Pizza My Heart tells a very familiar story. It’s a modernization of Romeo & Juliet, with the warring families being rivaled pizza-makers: the Prestolanis, who claim that their family made the first pizza delivery ever in history, and the Montebellos, who the Prestolanis claim stole the delivery idea from them hundreds of years ago. In other words, someone was reading Shakespeare, got hungry, ordered a pizza… and decided to meld their reading material and eating material into a screenplay.

(Image: allmovie.com)
(Image: allmovie.com)

Prestolani daughter Gina and Montebello son Joe soon become acquainted despite the long-time feud between their families. And, of course, filling the “Romeo” and “Juliet” roles, they fall in love.

Super-corny dialogue, an incredibly silly battle of the pizzas and plenty of drawn-out, love-lorn gazes between Gina and Joe in slow motion bring the cheese to the film. My favorite snippet of dialogue is a tomato metaphor for Joe’s attraction to Gina: “It’s like all these years you’ve been looking for the perfect tomato, and all along the perfect tomato’s been growing right next door!”

Though it doesn’t quite live up to its odd title, I’d still tag this one as moderately corny and highly enjoyable fluff. I expected (and wished) that it would have been even more awkward and mozzarella-smothered, but it’s still cheesy enough to earn a spot in the CoTC Hall of Fame.