Down Terrace
Down Terrace
| 30 July 2010 (USA)
Down Terrace Trailers

After serving jail time for a mysterious crime, Bill and Karl get out of jail and become preoccupied with figuring out who turned them in to the police. On top of that, the "family business" is on the rocks, and the motley crew of criminals who operate out of Down Terrace aren't feeling terribly trusting of one another. It might look like an ordinary house, but at Down Terrace, the walls are closing in..

Reviews
Wordiezett

So much average

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AutCuddly

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

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Neive Bellamy

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

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Geraldine

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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baradanikto

On repeated viewings, this film becomes more enjoyable as a very,very,very dark comedy.Initially as a crime/drama it has an endearing and shocking effect, but I can't help feeling that Ben Wheatley's intention for this was to be a dark comedy.It's raw, disturbing, but the outrageous psychosis in this film now has me laughing all the way through.The acting, claustrophobic camera work and the music are excellent.Deserves a 9/10.

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sirako

It's a movie you will enjoy only if you enjoy being cheated.The music is awful, and it's the only thing I thought it was well executed. The actors are good, but the characters are not worthy. It's never rally developed and it look like a collage of ideas from everywhere with a not really good result. The movie feels cheap instead of home made (I adore cheap films when you don't think about the budget while you are watching) but also, it feels like the people involved never had the courage to accept it wasn't material for a full length movie, maybe a short might have worked well.Dark comedy never really comes, not at all, since it's not very well justified (not in a poetic, non-sense way), it is just bad written, not absurd, or evil, or with a commentary in human nature, it just repeats what dark humor geniuses have done, without understanding why humor has to be black, but also humor (like Swift, or Marquis de Sade's writing) it felt so superficial that the only funny thing around this movie, is people saying "if you don't think is funny, it's because you are dumb".This movie is, in my opinion, a waste; of good ideas, of good actors and a waste of the viewers experience, and I feel guilty cause I've spent some time writing about it.Just watch it if you LOVED Kill List, the whole thing, even the lazy ending.

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fedor8

The shocker wasn't the predictable ending but IMDb's page. "Comedy/Crime" it says. What comedy? There wasn't an iota of a funny moment in this. The movie was interesting throughout – barring the slow and muddled 10-15-minutes intro – but if this was intended as a comedy then it failed miserably. As a crime drama it's an 8/10, as a comedy it is a round zero.I enjoyed the various plot-twists, but who didn't realize that Karl's mental instability would lead to murder within the family? The movie's other problem is its lack of realism. A family this distrustful would have annihilated each other years ago, because we have to assume that Karl didn't become a manic-depressive trigger/hammer-happy psychopath overnight. The ease with which Maggie kills her own brother doesn't ring true either, even though it was a fun plot-twist. The ease with which Karl's PREGNANT girlfriend butchers Maggie rings even less true. Having one brutal female killer in a movie is acceptable, but having two is just stretching the credibility somewhat.Just because all these people are involved with the mob cannot make ALL of them criminally insane, not to this extent anyway. They kill each other off far too easily – within a very small time-frame - while displaying a lack of discipline and self-control that makes me wonder how the hell these people ever even got into organized crime (organized, meaning you don't just go and kill anybody you want off-hand) and how they managed to last longer than an hour. Key word: "organized". If the British mob were this anarchic, it wouldn't exist; it's that simple. Fact is, it's not just the family that is kill-happy, but everyone else also. I was half-expecting a milkman to appear out of nowhere and to start swinging knives and axes around.Again, I refuse to forgive the film on account of it being allegedly a comedy – because it clearly isn't one. (God help DT's writers if they thought they were writing one!) I suppose a lot of the interesting twists came at the expense of logic and credibility, both of these being sacrificed in order to advance the story's interest potential. Even if it were a comedy, it's not a comedy in the ZAZ or even Guy Ritchie vein, hence a certain degree of realism has to be expected.A word of advice to the director and writers: the only way a black comedy can work – i.e. be funny as opposed to just interesting – is to turn it into a stylized, large-than-life venture, not a kitchen-sink ordeal. The kitchen-sink approach works only for drama, never for a comedy within a serious context i.e. a serious subject matter. You can't make a bunch of bonafide psychopaths funny and amusing if you film them with a wobbly camcorder, getting the viewer too close to the reality of their dark existence, warts, kitchen-sinks and all. Plus, you need actors with comedic abilities, and those aren't easy to come by."British Sopranos" my butt. Watch this as a psychological crime drama and you will get something out of it. Watch it as a comedy and you will be extremely disappointed.

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GrahamEngland

British crime films are a very mixed bunch, for every 'Long Good Friday' or 'Sexy Beast', there is a whole load of low rent, formulaic fayre of diminishing returns.This film has one advantage from the off, not being set in London - or as many of the characters in the poorer films of this genre say it, 'Laanndan'. (Hiding those well brought up accents can be a strain perhaps).It's set in Brighton, a town (recently upgraded to a 'City') on England's south coast. But not the Brighton known to many here in recent years, the place of celeb second homes, nightclub culture, a liberal place for homosexuals before most of the rest of the country became more adult and relaxed about this part of society.The Brighton of mundane suburbia is the setting, not the cultural epicentre.Largely set in a home, where Bill and his wife live with their 34 year old son, we first see them, the father and son, after being acquitted in a drugs trial, little to celebrate though - how did they get into court in the first place? Who grassed them up - have to be someone close, to their right little, tight little world of lower ranking club employees and drug pushers.The home is the actual dwelling of the actor playing the father, where the son - his real life son - was actually brought up. Only the mother is played by a quite familiar actress - Julia Deakin. The father, Bill, being an ex hippy who wistfully reflects on the brief period of apparent enlightenment through Cannabis and LSD, via yoga and the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, before money, crime, harder drugs, intruded - which swept up Bill too.So begins a claustrophobic period of suspicion, paranoia, leading to violence and murder. Between bouts of domestic bickering, including a 'meet my pregnant girlfriend' family dinner that is a mire of passive-aggressiveness.The cast are largely drawn - when they are not family members of the writer and actor playing the son - from innovative and usually rather dark comedy shows and stand up.Micro budget it might have, but Down Terrace punches well above it's weight. Lack of flash leads to a concentration on family dynamics - albeit a deeply disturbing one - realistic script and genuine plot shocks and surprises.This film is refreshing, often laugh out loud funny - darkly funny usually - intense and a real gem. Clearly a labour of love from the small team involved in the whole production, a labour though of inspiration rather than just perspiration.

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