One suspects the dinner table conversation about making “Family Movie” had to go a bit better for Kevin Bacon than for Jack Smith, the B-movie director he plays in this horror movie send-up. But the fear that Bacon has gathered everyone for something indulgent is quickly disabused in the silly and gory comedy where the fun all are having on screen extends to those who aren’t directly related.

Like the scrappy productions that Jack specializes in, “Family Movie” is crude in most respects, including its brusque, reckless editing to match its many brutal kills. But it’s sophisticated where it counts when it quickly moves away from easy jokes about being on the low-budget set to harder truths about being in a showbiz family that have to be confronted as a real killer runs loose on the farm. It’s instantly ingratiating to see Helen, (Kyra Sedgwick) and her daughter Ula (Sosie Bacon), serving up sandwiches to the crew after wrapping a scene they’ve just shot as actors in patriarch Jack’s latest opus “Blood Moon,” though even with everyone pitching in, it is hardly a happy set. Jack is nagged by Maya (Liza Koshy), a BTS videographer that he’d love to get rid of if her father wasn’t financing part of the production, and also his musician son Trent (Travis Bacon), who aspires to operate the camera just once even though he hasn’t entirely decided on a professional path forward. Ula also has career problems, but the good kind, when her manager Catherine (Andrea Savage) pushes past the patchy cell service deep in the heart of Texas to inform her that she’s landed the lead in a TV series, though taking the role will mean bailing on her parents before the shoot ends.

When Jack faces mounting debt as a producer and is losing light by the passing second as a director, he can’t be really bothered to care when he discovers that Helen has killed their neighbor Bill (John Carroll Lynch). Not only was the neighbor’s noisy canine ruining takes, Bill was being a bit of a dog himself, asking for sexual favors. But it does become the driving force of the comedy when a local sheriff (Scoot McNairy) comes poking around and the family starts to learn Bill’s murder might not have been an isolated incident. While playing the most overlooked member of the family, Sedgwick has the juiciest role as a happy housewife who gleefully slices through more than just bread for craft services.

While little is taken seriously by the filmmakers, Dan Beers’ script does just enough dramatic legwork to get at the heart of the family’s issues. Helen is said to have sacrificed a promising acting career to star in her husband’s films and raise their kids, adding an interesting wrinkle to Ula’s dilemma about breaking the news of her next gig to her parents. Travis also wishes he could speak more easily to his dad, and while the character is the least developed of the lot, Trent Bacon looks the most at home stalking around the set of of an indie shoot, with his long hair and general indifference to what’s being filmed. He makes his presence felt in the film’s heavy metal soundtrack that he contributes to with his band Contracult.

It’s not every slasher film that ends with the filmmakers’ personal home movies from school plays and concerts accompanying the credits, but knowing it’s corn syrup that makes all the fake blood spilled so thick, the sweetness doesn’t seem entirely off the mark. The spirit of the endeavor can forgive a lot, with some clumsy filmmaking that doesn’t seem to be an intentional homage, such as a slapdash set-up to Helen’s murderous ways and a slightly tacked-on feeling opening involving a film critic who has been a thorn in Jack’s side. Not everyone will appreciate a dance number chaotically spliced into a gruesome sequence set around a woodchipper, yet it plays like gangbusters for the right crowd, feeling as if the film hasn’t just brought a family together on screen, but one off of it as well — in laughter.