"The House" goes too far, which is exactly what comedies should be doing.

In The House, straight-laced suburban couple Kate (Amy Poehler) and Scott (Will Ferrell) Johansen, strapped for their daughter’s college tuition, go into the casino business with their self-destructive friend Frank (Jason Mantzoukas), whose wife is leaving him and whose house is about to go into foreclosure. Their venue: Frank’s nearly empty house (the wife took all the furniture except for some chairs and a TV), which looks a little bit like the one from The Brady Bunch. Their clientele: all of their friends and neighbors in the sleepy little community of Fox Meadow. Fox Meadow, a perfectly manicured hamlet of square houses and square people, feels utterly boringly real, and the movie quickly recasts both the people and the place in a new, delightfully alarming alternate universe. The House envisions suburban America as a prison in which “keeping up with the Joneses” is really just a form of self-imprisonment. The movie’s mission? Parole, for very bad behavior.

The House, though an imperfect comedy, has a delightfully dark and looney sensibility. The director, Andrew J. Cohen, co-wrote Neighbors (2014) with Brendan O’Brien, and they reunited for the screenplay on The House. Both Neighbors and The House have something that most other recent comedies lack: a willingness to descend into madness and never return. There’s no big attempt at reforming the protagonists once they delve into their bizarre business endeavor.

And this trio, Poehler, Ferrell, and Mantzoukas, is weird in all the right ways. They embrace their glamorous life of crime just as you would expect suburban people to do so: to them, it’s as if they’ve somehow traveled into an episode of The Sopranos. Their homegrown casino suggests a lurid, grown-up fairy tale, and also the adult equivalent of a Looney Toons short.

Frank is the self-destructive one, and the catalyst for Kate and Scott’s own descent into transgressive behavior. But they’ve always had this urge in them. They’re weirdos at heart who’ve been in suburbia for too long. We get hints of this by their interactions with their daughter, Alex (Ryan Simpkins), like when they try to inform her about date rape with an improvised “scenario” that goes horribly wrong.

The turning point is the scene in which Will Ferrell accidentally chops off a customer’s middle finger with an axe in Jason Mantzoukas’s garage. They have just caught the man counting cards, and in a hasty decision, they strong-arm him out of the casino with plans to scare him. But he’s a legit criminal who works for some tough crime boss (Jeremy Renner, who figures in a hilarious cameo in the third act), not at all intimidated by these three “soccer moms” as he calls them. Scott, who has so much repressed rage (or is it merely repressed passion from the dullness of his very normal life?) strikes, intending to scare the man, but instead hacks off his finger. And then, in full-on Italian splatter movie style, blood spurts everywhere, dousing Ferrell’s face as he screams in horror at his actions. That’s when people start calling him “The Butcher,” and acquires a new degree of fear-based respect from his neighbors.

But it’s not just Ferrell’s character who’s transformed by their foray into illegal gambling. The casino brings out the Id in everybody: two men engage in a knock-down-drag-out fight, but before they can commence, the other customers turn it into a betting war, and the “house” begins to host fights between neighbors; two women, who have fired passive aggressive shots at each other in town hall meetings past, take their aggressions to the ring, in an amazingly brutal, uncomfortable scene.

So few comedies have the courage of their convictions. They want to shake things up temporarily but then restore normalcy. (This is the Judd Apotow syndrome, and it has had a deadly effect on the genre.) But The House wants to tear “normal” to shreds. The new identity that Scott and Kate have formed for themselves reignites their passion for each other, their sense of being alive. The House goes too far, which is exactly what comedies should be doing. We’ll figure out the boundaries later.

With Nick Kroll (as the tyrannical town council chairman), Michaela Watkins, Cedric Yarbrough, Rob Huebel, and Lennon Parham.

Four Mini-Reviews

Below are capsule reviews for four movies I didn’t get around to writing about during the year.

The Captive—Ryan Reynolds (who’s admittedly very good) plays a beleaguered father whose young daughter vanishes without a trace. The police suspect him, but actually she’s been kidnapped by an ultra-creepy predator who’s part of a network of child abusers. In its own way, The Captive works. It’s effective, but it’s probably the most unpleasant movie experience of the year, particularly because of the absolute misery the film puts its characters through. Rosario Dawson plays a detective who specializes in finding predators. (Her character is put into a ludicrous situation that hampers the film’s credibility.) With Scott Speedman, Mirielle Enos, and Kevin Durand. Written by the director, Atom Egoyan, and David Fraser.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me—Equal parts maudlin and amusing, this documentary about the blowsy comedian is interesting and yet, it’s kind of depressing to see old celebrities having to essentially whore themselves out in order to make ends meet. (It’s not unlike the Joan Rivers doc from a few years ago.)

The Heart Machine—A dull indie drama about a man whose girlfriend—whom he meets online—may be putting one over on him. He believes her to be living in Germany on a writing fellowship, but then he sees a girl who looks just like her on the subway one day. Is she a doppelganger or is his girlfriend lying to him? The film isn’t nearly as interesting as its premise.

The LEGO Movie—I just wanted it to end.

The Campaign

Disappointingly undercooked political comedy. If you're hoping that The Campaign will provide some leavening comic relief from the election blitz, you may feel you've simply sunk even lower into the bowels of American politics by the time the credits roll. Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, as rival contenders for a North Carolina Congressional district, prove how convincingly they can play horrible people. There are scattered laughs, but the movie tries to have it both ways: it's a showcase of the unmitigated greed and buffoonery of politicians who don't have the first notion of what it means to actually do their job, as well as a dirtified Frank Capra-ish tale of what it would be like if a truly honest politician were elected to perform some much-needed housecleaning. Neither tack works, because The Campaign fizzles pretty soon after it begins. The characters have no appeal, most of the actors aren't all that funny, and the scattered laughs only point up the amount of time there is between them. The audience I was with seemed to overcompensate with its laughter during the funny moments, as though we were laughing at what we hoped would be a funny movie that was only intermittently successful. And, if vulgarity turns you off, you would do well to avoid this movie. Crassness can be very funny, but only when it's clever. Here it's just chaotic and stupid.

Jay Roach once again demonstrates his infantile directorial sensibilities. He turns an ostensibly golden premise into a not-ready-for-publication waste of time, with little help from the writers, Chris Henshy and Shawn Harwell. You can tell that Ferrell and Galifianakis improvised a lot, but their mugging doesn't work as much as they probably hoped. (Ferrell never was all that funny unscripted.) Of course they have their moments. Both of them reek of comic potential, but they never do enough with their characters, which are essentially stereotypes: the good-old-boy politician who can't keep his pants on and talks in platitudes, and the creepy, prissy mama's boy who is inexplicably married with two sons. They never transcend these paper-thin roles, and you get the feeling it's because they haven't thought about what could be done with them. Will Ferrell always looks too self-contented with the mediocrity of his work.

There were a few actors in the supporting cast who give the movie a little pizzazz: Katherine LaNassa plays Ferrell's spouse, the ultimate trophy wife who knows how to play the supportive "other half" on screen as long as she gets what she wants. And Dylan McDermott, as Galifianakis' campaign manager, looks self-assured and cruelly dedicated to his job, which is being funded by two rich old brothers (played by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) who remind you of the old millionaires in Trading Places. In fact, The Campaign borrows more than a little from that movie's plot line.

With Jason Sudeikis as Ferrell's campaign manager, Brian Cox, Sarah Baker, Jack McBrayer, and a number of real-life media talking heads (Piers Morgan, Chris Matthews, Bill Maar, to name a few) appearing as themselves.