Recently I got the chance to experience what has quite possibly turned to become my favorite trilogy in the preceding decade, spawned from the minds of a few crazy Brits with one hell of a sense of humor and refuge in audacity. This would be The Cornetto Trilogy, or as it's also sometimes known as, The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy.
For the uninitiated, the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy is the colloquial term spawned as an in-joke between Edgar Wright's creative team, referring to the three comedy genre films which star Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in leading roles, with Edgar Wright on the helm as director, sharing the writing duties with Pegg. The three movies are generally deconstructions of genre movies with the general humoristic angle stemming from the chemistry shared by the leading duo, their ability to play off one another and the overall British sensibilities that not many major blockbusters can provide. The trilogy is named after Cornetto due to each movie significantly featuring a Cornetto ice cream of different flavor, with each having a correlation to the themes of each movie. The movies are Shaun of the Dead (Strawberry/Red Cornetto, a play on gore), Hot Fuzz (Classic/Blue Cornetto, a play on police themes) and The World's End (Mint/Green Cornetto, a play on sci-fi and aliens).
My initial reason for wanting to watch these movies came after a recommendation of The World's End from one of my friends. The selling line for me was "it's a movie where a gang of friends fight alien robots by getting more drunk". I'd been interested in these movies for quite some time, and my only experience with any of these people involved has been seeing Simon Pegg in Mission Impossible 3. With that said, I didn't think I could do the movie justice without giving the two preceding movies a try as well, as The World's End was commonly hyped up as the end of a particular "era" for the collaborators. Without hesitation I picked up the boxset and gave all the movies a spin.
Shaun of the Dead
Whenever I hear about the trio of movies, Shaun of the Dead seems to be, from my experience at least, the one that most people talk about. At the very least, when talking cult status, it seems like this is the one that caters more to a niche both heavily present at the time of it's release and still lingering in present date.
In this movie we follow the every day life of the titular Shaun, played by Pegg, who is an irresponsible and lazy electronics shop employee. He's ridiculed on a regular basis by his colleagues, he has an estranged relationship with his mother due to his stepfather whom he detests, his social lifestyle makes his girlfriend treat him with disregard and his housemate treats him with a large level of animosity due to him humoring and allowing his crude and best friend Ed, played by Frost, to live with them. This all changes when the small, rural town is infested by a zombie outbreak, leaving Shaun and Ed no choice but to concoct an elaborate plan to recover Shaun's mother and girlfriend so they can all barricade themselves in the town's local pub, Winchester. Things go awry during the road when they end up stringing along more people than they bargained for, and what was to be a simple affair ends up becoming a complicated mad dash.
The thing I enjoyed most about this movie is it's premise. The movie came out in 2004, 2 years after 28 Days Later had revitalized the zombie genre, and it feels like it was definitely made for it's time with a relevant context to lampoon. Even now though, that context still feels relevant enough (no thanks to games like The Last of Us and series like The Walking Dead keeping the genre alive). The movie basically throws in zombies without any context and never bothers explaining them but the interesting thing surrounding the gag is that it plays with Shaun's paranoid expectations of a world out to get him, with some jump scare moments that you'd expect in a zombie movie not actually having anything to do with zombies - or subtle implications that Shaun is probably more of a zombie in the general sense than the monsters themselves are. So when the outbreak finally happens and Shaun and Ed are in the vicinity of it, we get treated with a lot of cues that play off of the humor you'd expect from lazy chums finding themselves in an awkward situation, and the characters continue to maintain their edge throughout the movie with enough acting punch to add tension to otherwise funny situations.
The first Edgar Wright movie I ever got the pleasure to witness was Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and while it couldn't tell me much about Wright's sense of comedy as that was purely an adaptation, it did tell me about his sense of direction, and the man has an incredible kinetic visual style which really makes some of these scenes come alive. One of the main reasons I could tell it was the same director was the high octane bar action scene where Pegg and co. provided a lot of tense action to an incredibly grungey British rock score. The humor was still the main driving force though, as well as the character chemistry. That alone gave me hope that the next two movies were going to be a joy to behold as well.
If the movie has any issues it feels like they come down to a general clustered second half. By the time you get passed the idea of a British comedy zombie apocalypse, the later half of the movie doesn't really end up having much new to provide and is a generally predictable affair. This is where Wright's elaborate direction style comes into play a bit more, but it does not feel nearly as explosive as it could be and doesn't balance out some tedium that happens before that. Again, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World proved that Wright has terrific cinematography chops, and for a majority of this movie the action mainly revolves around the main cast wailing away at zombies with cricket bats and shovels. It's pretty funny at first, but the final act upped the ante to the point that it had me wanting a lot more in that regard, with that being the only moment where the action seems to take a bit of a boost.
But this was 2004 and throughout the years there was a lot bigger fish to fry.
Hot Fuzz
This is the movie I've known for most of my life when being "aware" that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg existed.
In this movie, Pegg plays Nicholas Angel - a cop that is incredibly overqualified for his job to the point that his superiors and colleagues in the London Police force experience a blow to their confidence and have him transfered to a small town that is completely free of crime. After a run-in with Danny Butterman, a naive officer who Nick arrested for drinking and driving, he discovers that Danny is to be appointed as Nick's partner. Danny admires Nick's extreme cop chops, but Nick has a hard time adjusting to the remote town of Sanford and it's complete lack of criminal activity. This all comes to a screeching halt when mysterious and gruesome deaths are passed off by the community as "accidents", influencing Nick to investigate the matter and potentially finding an insidious conspiracy surrounding the town.
One of the things I took note of the most was that Pegg and Frost's interplay was by no means a fluke in the previous movie as these two are natural born co-operators. The chemistry these two manage to have is pretty astounding and some of the more personal scenes are fun to behold. You can tell these two are probably very close friends in real life.
As a plot there was a whole lot more for me to digest here in contrast to Shaun of the Dead, which effectively ended up filling a lot of gaps in the pacing. This particular enterprise is generally a spoof of buddy cop action movies, but unlike many of it's peers that it constantly references and pays homage to (Bad Boys 2 in particular) they play out less like finding an approach to take down the bad guy and more like an ongoing detective story. This makes a lot of the movie an incredibly tense venture that you can't really predict where it will go, with twists and turns at every angle.
The action was also amped up to full here. This was where a lot of my preconceived parallels started to come into fruition with some really gruesome beats and action scenes. It also plays a lot with it's own continuity with some brick jokes coming into full force due to the small area that the characters are allowed to operate in, and the final action sequence, yet again, serves as a really spectacular showdown. Overall, this was a movie that for me, ended on a really high note and I feel this will be one of my favorite movies of all time once I let it sink in.
The World's End
Six years later we're finally treated to the appropriate end of this particular series and the one which I was most anticipating to see - The World's End.
In this movie, Pegg plays Gary King - a middle-aged has-been who dreams of the anarchic days with his mates and wants to get all of them together for one final hoorah, which involves completing the fabled "Golden Mile", a feat which they once tried but failed. The challenge is a 12-stop long pub crawl with the final stop being "The World's End". This challenge ends up being complicated for the simple fact that all of Gary's friends have grown out of their rambunctious high-school days and lead regular and accomplished, yet uneventful lives, with Gary being the only one who seemingly never grew out of his high school persona. Things start going haywire when they discover that their hometown Newton Haven have been overrun by bodysnatching aliens, and the pubs become pit stops for bloody pub brawls.
Unlike Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead this seems to be the only movie that isn't taking a British spin on a particular genre movie. This can easily be classified as a general stand-alone sci-fi movie that isn't a general parody, and interestingly enough it seems to be the only one that has a larger, deliberate message to say about the world and conformity. The fact that the protagonist leading this story is a drunk, former junkie is incredibly ironic when you think of it.
Which brings me to another point - the archetypes that Pegg and Frost embody seems to have taken a switch with this one. Pegg was often depicted as the straight man in the previous films; the only one with a semblance of sanity in a mad world, while Frost took the helm as the crude and larger-than-life foil. Seeing Pegg instead take the helm as the crazy one highlights a lot of his comedic ability which end up being scene stealers. Frost playing the straight man in this one leaves two thoughts; one of them being that he reminds me of a British Rocco Botte, and the second that he's far more sympathetic than I had anticipated. This movie probably ended up showing more of their range as far as acting goes. One of the final scenes they share together in particular is probably one of the better performances either of them have ever put on and it ends up justifying these two characters' behavior in a massive way.
Yet again, the action is a marvel - but this being a 2013 movie it definitely feels like the experiences Wright have learned in terms of action started paying off for full, and as far as that goes it feels like the movie Shaun of the Dead should have been. Unconventional prop usage, body parts being ripped off and used as weapons, plenty of alien blood, all of that is in the forefront. Even the dashing sequences end up being seat-gripping with each new pub stop. And the ending is easily the best one any of these movies have so far.
My only issue with this movie is that while the promise of a five-man band seemed elaborate and awesome as a whole, not a lot of time is given to make some of Gary's mates any more interesting. This is still Pegg's and Frost's show for the most of the part, and it would have been interesting to see the supporting cast lift more weight, if only because the idea of seeing middle-aged businessmen break their comfortable lifestyles to go all out in brawls sounds like a fun thing to experience.
Closing Words
I had high expectations, and these movies were a blast to marathon through. For me, my order of preference would have to be Hot Fuzz > The World's End > Shaun of the Dead. Hot Fuzz was easier to position for me because as a movie that felt far more consistent and progressive. It was harder for me to decide on where I stood with the two other movies as some flaws held the experiences back by a smidge. I edged more towards The World's End though on the basis that as a movie it felt like it had more to provide and just a generally bigger message to convey, where-as Shaun of the Dead, while immensely entertaining, felt more like a product more befitting of it's time and circumstance.
In any case, it was fascinating as all hell to see these people band together for something great, and I can't wait to see what the future has in store for them.
