Starring Robert Hill and Robin Hill. Unrated. Plays from Saturday to Wednesday, November 13 to 17, at the Vancity Theatre

“It’s important to have good intentions, regardless of the outcome.” That’s one of the key lines from Down Terrace, delivered by the tersely philosophical British drug dealer at its deeply cynical centre.

Events, which take forever to get moving, mostly take place inside the working-class row house one Cockney crime family calls home. A prison sentence has just been averted, postponed, or maybe even served by the above-quoted patriarch, Bill (Robert Hill), and shaggy son Karl, played by the actor’s son, Robin, who also cowrote the seemingly improvised script with director Ben Wheatley, a Britcom veteran.

These lads have issues, and they are not exactly salved by Karl’s mother, Maggie (Julia Deakin), as cold-blooded as Lucretia Borgia but without the bedside manner. Some of their pals drop ’round, and it’s a sorry band of losers: petty thugs who pass their free time singing old English folk songs, badly. When Karl’s sometime girlfriend (Kerry Peacock) shows up pregnant and the paternity is, um, in question, we know there will be “ructions”. Still, it’s surprising when the family turns homicidal. They also have some paranoid theories about who “grassed” the boys, but is that enough reason to start buying Saran Wrap in bulk?

Some of the results are undeniably funny, in squirm-making ways. It’s as if the English cast of The Office ran into the sentimental clowns from Eastbound & Down and they started murdering each other—just because they were all fans of The Sopranos. This TV-infected sensibility doesn’t make for much of a movie. But it’s fun, I suppose, for anyone who ever wanted to kill the entire cast of Men Behaving Badly.