After turning horror and crime movies hilariously on their heads in "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright are preparing to do the same for sci-fi thrillers in their new movie, "The World's End," and the new trailer makes it look like the team has struck gold for the third time.

Like "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," "The World's End" was directed by Edgar Wright, co-written by Wright and Simon Pegg, and stars Pegg and Nick Frost. Also like their earlier films, "The World's End" melds very British humor with genuine thrills, all set against the backdrop of life in an otherwise unremarkable community in the UK.

In "The World's End," Simon Pegg plays Gary, a guy who seems to be emotionally stuck in adolescence. The fondest memory of his life is a pub crawl from his teenage days when he and four of his buddies set out to knock back five pints of beer each in twelve different bars. Gary decides to reunite his old friends for a rematch twenty years later, still stung by the fact they never made it to the last pub on their list, the World's End. However, Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine, "In America" and "The Bourne Ultimatum"), Peter (Eddie Marsan, "Sherlock Holmes" and "War Horse") and Oliver (Martin Freeman, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" and "What's Your Number?") aren't much on partying these days, and it takes some heavy convincing from Gary to get them to tag along. Knocking back booze becomes the least of their worries when the guys notice that things are not what they used to be in their old hometown. Soon they're soon on the run from a variety of alien invaders, including hordes of menacing figures with glowing blue eyes, skeletal metal attack machines, and a handful of possessed blondes in schoolgirl uniforms.

Known to fans as the "Cornetto Trilogy," each film in the Pegg/Frost/Wright partnership features the characters enjoying a different flavor of the British ice-cream treat - red in "Shaun of the Dead," blue in "Hot Fuzz," and now green in "The World's End." All three men have said this is likely to be the last film they'll make as a team, and judging from the trailer, they're going out on a high note. "The World's End" trailer previews a movie that's very funny but also delivers the goods in the genre it parodies, with a genuine air of menace, some slam-bang action, and laughs that also reinforce the story and the characters.

"The World's End" will open in American theaters on August 23, just over a month after it premiers in Great Britain. If this isn't the biggest movie of the summer season - another movie starring Simon Pegg, "Star Trek: Into Darkness" stands to make a lot more bank - it stands an excellent chance of being among the funniest and most purely enjoyable.