SAN DIEGO — The Cornetto trilogy continues with a bang with “The World’s End.”
Filmmaker Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the cheeky blokes who brought you the classic zombie epic “Shaun of the Dead” and the action romp “Hot Fuzz” are back in the coming of middle-age in the apocalypse movie “The Worlds End.”
The pithy Wright sees the cycle as a riff on “the joys and dangers of perpetual adolescence.”
“World’s End,” an epic pub crawl adventure, is the last in the trio of movies. It’s the exclamation point on the quirky mythology.
“It’s the unifying factor in the trilogy of films,” says Pegg, who also plays Scotty in the Trek reboot, “We wanted to give it a great sendoff.”
Pegg quips that the bromance cum sci-fi flick is also an homage to Whovianesque time travel, only “our Tardis is beer.”
Wright concurs: “It’s like Dr. Who if the Dr. were really hammered…Dr. Hooch.”
His character Gary is a “sad goth” antihero lost in 1990. A king in high school, he never found his way to adulthood.
Instead he just drags all of his buds back into his time warp in a sort of “Big Chill” meets “Alien.”
Though they hedged about revealing too many of the flick’s secrets, Pegg said that Gary is one of the most challenging roles he has ever played.
“He’s the villain of the film as much as he is the hero,” says Pegg. “He’s a nutcase.”
Frost, a man of few words, said it was nice to play a character that’s not a “stoned idiot.” His character is an tightly-wound corporate lawyer who turns into “pink hulk” after hitting the sauce.
Cornetto fans flocked to the morning panel in Hall H and they’re weren’t even any pints in sight. The witty meets schlocky movie spins around an epic pub crawl involving 12 bars and countless plot twists and turns. Bottoms up.
Karen D’Souza is at Comic-Con this week. Follow her at Twitter.com/KarenDSouza4.
