So they team up with their pal Frank (Jason Mantzoukas) whose gambling addiction has destroyed his marriage and his self-esteem. He hopes to win back his estranged wife, Raina (Michaela Watkins) and persuades Scott and Kate to open an illegal casino in his half-empty mini-mansion. The business plan is straightforward: The house always wins.

If “The House” had been made in the ’70s, it would have reveled in the grimness of the Johansens’ circumstances and exploited the moral tawdriness of their response to it. What is most unnerving about the way their story is presented here — Andrew Jay Cohen directed, and wrote the script with Brendan O’Brien — is the absence of that kind of dramatic intensity. Scott and Kate do some terrible things, and induce their friends and neighbors to misbehave in sometimes frightening ways. Scott mutilates someone with an ax. More than one person, actually. In addition to blackjack and roulette, the casino features an occasional fight club, in which upstanding folks pair off and beat each other bloody as their fellow burghers wager money on the outcome.

The thing that will dismay some tenderhearted viewers — and that may have spooked the distributor — is the film’s steely refusal of hypocrisy. You wait for the moment of comeuppance or redemption, for the restoration of right and wrong, but no such moment arrives. The pop-culture references and musical cues that pepper the action are not as ironic as they may seem. Scenes from “The Walking Dead” and snatches of Snoop Dogg’s “Gz and Hustlas” and the “Sopranos” theme song provide clues about the reality that Kate and Scott are only partly aware they inhabit.

The town’s political leadership (represented by Nick Kroll) is greedy and corrupt. Law enforcement (represented by Rob Huebel) is stupid and belligerent. The casino becomes not only a place of recreation but also the only place where civic interactions among the citizens seem possible. It also reveals the true face of a society divided into predators and prey, the house and the suckers.