The Cornetto Trilogy, Thoughts & The Worlds End Preview

Next week I'm going to see a film I've been looking forward to for nearly two years. The Worlds End has a lot of pressure on it to be as great as its two predecessors, and for that reason I'm avoiding all reviews and opinions until I see it, presumably leading to a more exaggerated reaction, good or bad. The trailer looks promising, if not all that different in style from the first two. But who's going to see it wanting it to be different? Well, me, a little bit.

I saw Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz pretty much back to back, way back in 2007 when the two were released on DVD together, and they were two of the funniest movies I had ever seen. Mixing traditional tropes of film making with Spaced style humour led to a fantasy ride of story telling, references, action, characterisation and flat out quality humour that could have only come from die-hard fans of said genre. Shaun of the Dead, of course, was your typical zombie flick. This trailer is unable to properly show its brilliance, which gives me hope for The Worlds End.

And Hot Fuzz? In the words of Simon Pegg himself, "we wanted to make British police cool for once." And cool they were. Car chases in Vauxhall Astras, fist fights with Timothy Dalton, references to Castle Greyskull, there's nothing here that the hippest young couple couldn't love. While I rank it slightly behind Shaun, I think that's mostly because I'm more familiar with the zombie genre than the buddy cop one. Which is my fault. Stupid me. The trailer here is probably the best of the three, likely due to the fact that Fuzz completely embraces the over the top Hollywood style of films and their trailers, while Shaun and, I assume, The World's End are trying more to be their own individual thing, but still get the Hollywood treatment in the trailers. It's hard to explain, so see for yourself.

Doesn't that work so much better than the first two? The "IN A WORLD" narrator sounds so much more at home.

Rest assured, I will be posting my review type thing on The Worlds End as soon as I can, after I see it, hopefully announcing that the perfect trilogy has been completed, never to be Lucas'd into oblivion. If it's more along the lines of Paul, I'll just have to appreciate the first two for what they are, and theorise that they just got a bit too carried away with their final installment. All I know for sure is, there are few films I've cared more about and wished harder to be good than The Worlds End. See you on the other side.