The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse

The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (2005) is a British horror-comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Steve Bendelack. Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, and Reece Shearsmith — the trio behind the BBC cult series The League of Gentlemen — wrote and star in it.

The residents of Royston Vasey have figured out they are fictional. When their grotesque little town faces destruction, a handful of its most unhinged characters punch through the wall between their scripted world and ours, landing in present-day Soho to confront the writers who made them. The journey takes them through seventeenth-century Britain and several layers of nested fiction.

Gatiss, Pemberton, and Shearsmith play both their characters and versions of themselves simultaneously, which should be insufferable and somehow is not — mostly because the film is openly cruel to everyone, including its own creators. Peter Kay and Simon Pegg show up in cameos. Going in cold without seeing the series will cost you most of the jokes; going in as a fan delivers a dense, strange, very dark farewell to Royston Vasey. Stream The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (2005) online on iFILM.