With the release of The World’s End, a science-fiction comedy about five chums who reunite to tackle their hometown’s marathon pub crawl only to find out that the village has been taken over by robots, director Edgar Wright puts a cap on his so-called Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, which also features the genre-busting cult classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The name comes from the British dessert company Cornetto, whose prepackaged ice cream cones are referenced in all three films, but there are more similarities than that. Most obviously, each film takes the form of a popular genre and simultaneously celebrates and deconstructs its various tenets: Shaun of the Dead, of course, is a zombie horror that works just as well as a romantic comedy; Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop-comedy in the vein of Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys; and The World’s End is a sci-fi thriller cum comedy-drama that somewhat resembles a mix of The Big Chill and Philip Kaufman’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
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Directed by Edgar Wright
