The one and only end-of-the-world buddy movie

As others have noted, The World's End makes up a third in what seems to be an Edgar Wright - Simon Pegg trilogy of zaniness and over-the-top British humor and genre-bending parody, and it's perhaps the funniest and weirdest of the 3 (Saun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) - what appears initially to be a story of a drinking binge, as Pegg (Gary King) engineers a school-days reunion, pulling together five high-school pals to re-enact a legendary pub crawl they undertook in their home town some 20 years before. The friends are estranged, haven't seen one another in at least a decade, skeptical, bored, a very unlikely group to come together for this debauch, esp Andy, who's now a nondrinker and a stick-in-the-mud moralist as well. But they do get together and begin the odyssey - a pint in each of the 10 pubs along the Golden Mile, ending they hope at the eponymous World's End. For the first half-hour or so, this seems a prototypical buddy-reunion movie, albeit with the very quick verbal wit typical of much British comedy; eventually, though, things get very strange and we're in a different genre altogether - this pub crawl becomes a zombie movie - about robot-like creatures trying to take over the planet and destroy humanity - I kid you not. Very few could bring off this transformation while maintaining the humor and the pace, but Wright-Pegg have shown they can and they do it again here. In this case, without belaboring the point, there's also a message and a theme: a lash-out against the homogenized corporate culture that is taking over so much of our lives - one of the first laments is how the pubs all look alike, the Starbucksization of British pub life; as we learn more about the zombies - or, since the guys agree they're not robots but can't figure out what to call them other than "them" (leading to a very funny exchange about pronouns) - the guys settle on calling them "blanks" until they can think of something better, and the world ends up calling "them" "blanks" (example of the weird verbal humor) - the plot to take over the world begins with numbing us through cell phones, tables, the Internet - haven't you noticed these things suddenly popping up everywhere, one of "them" warns? So it's not exactly a parody but a very unusual mash-up and take on Night of the Living Dead and the many other zombie movies (a quick wiki search will show that there have been hundreds) and movies about the apocalyptic end of the world (ditto).