No movie career is complete without a thematic trilogy, and actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright have got together, after each making a couple of larger, more expensive movies, to add The World’s End to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The link between the three is the satire on the lives of boozy slackers, on dreary, unchanging small provincial towns and low-budget horror movies. The first was a laddish romcom in which Simon Pegg and chums end up defending an English pub against hordes of zombies out of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. In Hot Fuzz he plays a maverick cop exiled to a country town that more than a little resembles the remote island in The Wicker Man.

In The World’s End, the loud, hard-drinking, immature Pegg draws four, well-settled petit bourgeois friends to join him on the disastrous pub crawl they never completed 20 years earlier, the week they left school. It’s funny, well observed, rowdy, and his companions – played by Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Nick Frost – are a plausible quartet of English types, square assholes refusing to accommodate this unwelcome Pegg. The big joke comes when the conventional, characterless home counties town they revisit is a British replica of the California township taken over by conformist aliens in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Edgar Wright has asked, nay politely implored, reviewers not to reveal “some of the surprises, twists and actors” in the movie. So I will merely say that there are a number of the first and second, and that a familiar face, suitably bewhiskered, plays the quintet’s former English teacher, though he himself is not English. A little too long, perhaps, but highly amusing, and handsomely photographed (Bill Pope) and designed (Marcus Rowland).