C

Shooting at a very big target with a peashooter, Jake Kasdan’s anemic little comedy is a weak satire of network television programming, telling you nothing you don’t already know and doing so without providing much more than an occasional mild chuckle. The lame title alone—it’s about the people who work in television, get it?—is indicative of its low sharpness level.

The plot of “The TV Set” has to do with the emasculation of a highbrow pilot script created by dour, dedicated writer-producer Mike Klein (David Duchovny, in professorial beard) under pressure from clueless network executives led by ratings-mad network president Lenny (Sigourney Weaver). She’s the champion of such pop favorites as “Slut Wars,” and thinks that his proposed dramedy “The Wexler Chronicles,” about a young lawyer who returns to his home town after his brother’s suicide, is just too smart and depressing to get an audience. Beginning by manipulating things to force Mike to cast broad comic Zach Harper (Fran Kranz) in the lead over his own choice for the part, she gradually gets the show molded into something much more conventional, ditching the suicide angle, adding broad sitcom touches (as well as some jiggles) and even bestowing (with the help of focus groups, of course) a new title—“He’s So Crazy!”

The crux of the story is Mike’s artistic dilemma—does he go along with the changes and get his show on the air (something he needs, with a wife—Natalie, played by Justine Bateman, and a child to support, not to mention his debilitating bad back), or stick to his guns and see it die in pilot hell? The pressures on him are paralleled by those felt by Lenny’s new head of programming, Richard McCallister (Ioan Gruffudd), a transplanted Brit with a reputation for quality who’s caught between his boss and Klein, while his own marriage is dissolving over the demands of his job.

The backstabbing, falsely supportive sleaziness of the entertainment industry isn’t exactly virgin territory, but it can still be fun, in a glib and facile fashion, if handled smartly. But Kasdan’s approach is too blunt and the points he’s making far too shallow. A scene in which a focus group is depicted grading Klein’s show, for example, is so sitcommy that it loses all credibility. And Kranz is encouraged to overplay too broadly. Even Weaver—though it’s fun to watch her do a routine as over-the-top as the one she did in “Working Girl”—falls into the same trap.

On the other hand, Duchovny underplays in a one-note, sad-sack performance that saps the energy from the picture, and the entire plot thread involving Gruffudd is treated so seriously (with the “Fantastic Four” star trying to give the part almost Shakespearean depth) that it seems totally out of place in this company. From the technical perspective the picture is mediocre, too; it’s obviously a modesty-budgeted indie piece, but still needs to have created a more convincing industry environment than it does.

What really sinks “The TV Set,” though, is the picture’s failure to portray a real deterioration from quality to mediocrity in Klein’s script. The scenes that we’re shown at the start as representative of his “brilliant” writing are bad to begin with, yet we’re supposed to find it an artistic assault that in the end they’re gussied up with fart noises and facial mugging. For Kasdan to have made the point he’s aiming for, the original material needs to be exceptional in some way, and gradually bastardized into conformity. It doesn’t help, either, that a big chunk of today’s television series, on the networks as well as cable, is actually pretty good—better, in fact, than this movie (and many others). “The Office,” for example, is far more cutting than Kasdan’s picture.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman made a comedy about the TV business in the telefilm “The Ratings Game.” Though two decades younger, Kasdan’s movie doesn’t represent an improvement on it.

B

You can’t say there’s much plot to Christopher Smith’s “Severance”—a group of defense-industry salespeople, stuck in a dilapidated joint somewhere in Eastern Europe after the bus transporting them to their company’s lodge for team-building exercises leaves them stranded, is threatened by maniacally murderous stalkers, and that’s all there is to it. Sure, there’s a half-hearted attempt at satirical relevance in the fact that these are, after all, arms merchants who get, in a quite literal sense as it turns out, hoist on their own petard. But that strain doesn’t really go beyond the cheekily sophomoric (most notably in a great, goofy gag about a rocket launcher near the close). It’s about the same level of socio-political commentary one might have found in one of the better Roger Corman efforts of earlier times.

And that’s what “Severance” basically is—a modern equivalent of a Cormanesque genre exercise, aping the most ubiquitous of today’s slasher-movie plots. Why, then, does it work, when virtually all its siblings fail so miserably?

One reason is that the targets here aren’t your usual bunch of randy teen-agers, but a group of older folk who mightn’t be any more deeply drawn (and may be equally stereotypical) but come across as more full-blooded, if you’ll pardon the pun (and better acted). There are team leader Richard (Tim McInnerny), a nervously imperious fellow reminiscent of Steve Carell’s Michael from “The Office,” and dubious gopher Billy (Babou Ceesay), as well as the staff—over-enthusiastic dweeb Gordon (Andy Nyman), druggie Steve (Danny Dyer), slick cynic Harris (Toby Stephens), principle-minded Jill (Claudie Blakley), and Maggie (Laura Harris), who’s as close as the group gets to a blonde bombshell. None can be described as richly layered, but they’re certainly more engaging than the empty-headed adolescents one usually gets in such flicks.

A second is a quick sense of humor, which again might not be terribly sharp but is far superior to the labored tongue-in-cheek jokes one usually encounters in such exercises in mayhem.

The third is that though it’s not exactly discreet in the matter of gore, it doesn’t go the more-repulsive-than-thou route that seems to have become obligatory nowadays. Certainly a pre-credit kill (which links up with the big finale) involves a shower of blood, but it’s shot with some reticence. A sequence involving a bear trap and a severed leg isn’t precisely subdued, but it goes more for tension and black comedy than mere revulsion. Even moments involving blowtorches eschew straight-on immolation. Even a “Hostel”-like moment begins with a sight gag and ends less gruesomely than you might anticipate. And while the final confrontation involves plenty of knives and body blows, the gritty cinematography keeps the violence dampened down.

Finally, “Severance” is saved by the fact that it’s unpretentious—despite an apparent weapons-industry link to all the nastiness (though, to be perfectly frank, the explanation for what’s happening remains at best oblique), there’s hardly a political drum-beat of indignation here. Too often pictures like this attempt to justify their low-brow genre aspirations by suggesting some profound message is lurking underneath even if it’s murky and confused one, but that’s hard to pull off convincingly. Happily, this movie doesn’t even try.

“Severance” is unpretentious in technical terms, too, looking every bit the poverty-row production it is in today’s terms. But Ed Wild’s cinematography fits perfectly, and you have to complement composer Christian Henson and the sound team for their effective use of “gotcha!” intrusions at the necessary moments.

In the sea of blood and gore rolling down theatre aisles nowadays, this cheeky, scary horror farce proves that the comic slasher movie isn’t dead yet.