Edgar Wright created a trio of classic comedies with the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy – Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End – but one of these movies is better than the others. Each entry in the trilogy takes a well-worn Hollywood genre and places its tropes and conventions in contemporary Britain. Shaun of the Dead is a zombie movie set in a London pub, Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop movie set in a sleepy rural village, and The World’s End is a Body Snatchers-style sci-fi movie about the feeling of alienation that sets in when people return to their hometown.

Named after its running gag of including a Cornetto ice cream cone in each film — and a nod to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy — the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy is a staple of modern British cinema. Wright co-wrote each movie’s screenplay with Simon Pegg, and Pegg starred alongside Nick Frost, his comedic partner and Spaced co-star, plus recurring players like Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy. All three movies in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy were well-received by both critics and audiences, but this ranking shows that only one of them is the best of the bunch.

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3 The World's End (2013) - Mint Cornetto

Gary and his friends drinking in The World's End

The final Cornetto movie, The World’s End, was met with the poorest response. With an admirable 6.9 rating on IMDb and an impressive 89% score on Rotten Tomatoes, The World’s End wasn’t panned by any means, but it wasn’t received as favorably as its predecessors. In the movie, Pegg plays Gary King, who peaked in high school and wants to relive the glory days of his youth by reuniting his old crew – “The Five Musketeers” – for a pub crawl they failed to complete as teenagers. Once they arrive, they find their hometown has been invaded by Doppelganger robots in a nod to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The World’s End is an interesting study of the downside of nostalgia and the dangers of romanticizing the past (an idea that Wright would later explore in more sinister depth in Last Night in Soho). It has a great soundtrack full of ‘90s hits, and it brilliantly subverts Pegg and Frost’s on-screen dynamic with Pegg as the zany comic personality and Frost as the straight man. But The World’s End’s script isn’t as tight as the other Cornetto movies. The pub crawl narrative gets a little repetitive, and it struggles to balance its dark dramatic themes of addiction and suicide with the characters’ wacky drunken antics.

2 Hot Fuzz (2007) - Classico Cornetto

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in a pub in Hot Fuzz

With a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.8 rating on IMDb, the second Cornetto movie, Hot Fuzz, was met with near-universal praise. Pegg stars as a big cop in a small town. After making the rest of his colleagues at the Met look bad, the competent, intelligent Sergeant Nicholas Angel is transferred from London to a sleepy West Country village with a suspiciously high accident rate, where he uncovers a widespread conspiracy with the help of bumbling local Constable Danny Butterman, played by Frost. Danny serves as the film’s meta mouthpiece, a superfan of the genre who comments on the similarities between his real life and his favorite movies.

Anchored by Pegg and Frost’s impeccable chemistry as mismatched detectives, Hot Fuzz is a pitch-perfect buddy cop movie. The duo is backed up by a sprawling cast full of scene-stealing supporting players like Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman, Paddy Considine, and Timothy Dalton. Hot Fuzz’s blend of action and comedy exhibits a great balance of laugh-out-loud gags like the runaway swan and spectacular action sequences like the pub shootout. But, with all the red herrings in its whodunit mystery plotting and all the B-plots in its overpopulated ensemble — not to mention an extra half-hour of runtime — Hot Fuzz isn’t quite as sharply structured as Shaun of the Dead.

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1 Shaun Of The Dead (2005) - Strawberry Cornetto

Shaun and Ed in the backyard in Shaun of the Dead

With a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 7.9 IMDb rating, Shaun of the Dead is the most acclaimed entry in the Three Flavours Cornetto ​​​​​trilogy by both critics and audiences. Pegg and Frost star as Shaun and Ed, a pair of slackers who find themselves contending with the end of the world when their hangover coincides with a zombie apocalypse. The genius of Shaun of the Dead’s foreshadowing-filled writing is that it’s a more or less typical romantic comedy, as Shaun is dumped by his girlfriend for refusing to grow up and decides to sort out his life to win her back — it just happens to also feature zombies.

Shaun of the Dead has the tightest script of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. Every scene has hilarious lines, like “He’s got an arm off,” and sight gags, like Shaun’s recurring visit to the corner shop, while advancing the plot and deepening the characters. It’s a spot-on spoof of the George A. Romero zombie movie formula, transplanting its tropes into a British setting with a band of survivors hiding out in their local pub. Shaun of the Dead is a rare example of a horror comedy with the genuine scares of a true horror film and the nonstop laughs of a straightforward comedy.

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