dunfincin I read the reviews here and being a great fan of British gangster films, I was looking forward to watching this.I found it a colossal disappointment. It is NOT entertaining,suspenseful,edifying,moving or in any way interesting.It IS crass,vulgar,boring and repulsive. We see a social class E family living in a rundown Council house pretending that they are in some way serious gangsters with sinister underworld connections. If they derive an income from organised crime,why are they living in a slum? They are generally fat,ugly,unemployable and unappealing people acting like rejects from an Eastenders episode.They try to give the the impression of being physically tough but any US marine,British commando or 2 REP guy could walk through the lot of them in 60 seconds.I have met families like these.They don't work because no one would employ them. They live on the outskirts of society in a miasma of drugs,alcohol,schoolboy violence and general depravity. The only thing that seems to set this lot apart is a deeply morbid pathology.Quite what the director and actors were trying to show us defeats me completely. I'm all for ¨real¨drama but this was like watching psychopathic chimpanzees in a zoo. And no,I didn't like it.

l_rawjalaurence Set in a mundane suburban area of Kent, DOWN TERRACE is the blackest of black comedies involving a family headed by Bill (Robin Hill) who in collaboration with his son Karl (Robin Hill) tries to discover the identity of an informant who shopped them to the police and thereby confined them to prison. There are several suspects among their intimate group, notably Eric (David Schaal), Garvey (Tony Way), and Councillor Berman (Mark Garvey). Meanwhile Eric and his wife Maggie (Julia Deakin) object to Karl's continuing relationship with Valda (Kerry Peacock).Ably performed in semi-improvised style by a first-rate cast, Ben Wheatley's film emphasizes the culture of mistrust that permeates this so-called close network of criminals. Although professing loyalty to one another through frequent hugs and epithets ("You know I love you"), it's clear that no one really can rely on anyone else to be truthful either in their behavior or their responses to one another. This is a dog-eat-dog community in which only the fittest can survive. There are some gory moments in the film, but they are handled with such panache that we understand Wheatley"s purpose in including them - in a world where 'good' and 'evil' no longer exist, every behavioral move can be seen as absurd, even comic.Tautly filmed with an astute use of close-up, pans and two-shots in tight spaces, DOWN TERRACE is a low (or perhaps) no-budget piece of work that nonetheless confirms the director's mastery of cinematic form. Highly recommended.

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.

FlashCallahan 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 crew of criminals who operate out of the house aren't feeling terribly trusting of one another. It might look like an ordinary house, but the walls are closing in...All directors had to start somewhere, and although there are flashes of genius that were to come, it all feels very amateur and a little hard to swallow. I was expecting some funny banter between the cast, and whilst it has it very now and again, its not enough to keep you from losing interest.The cast are good, and there are some funny moments, especially when Karl is looking for some letters, but the way its filmed just feels too claustrophobic, and if this was Wheatleys I tension, he's overdone it a little.Compared to the likes of Kill List, Sightseers, and A Field In England, its not good, but it has the Wheatley magic in there for you to enjoy the flashes of genius, but there are just too many flaws.