Midway through Act II of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” Martin McDonagh’s latest black eye to the Ireland Tourism Board, two fairly incongruous sounds can be heard. One is the whining rasp of a handsaw carving through a spinal cord. The other is a wave of appalled laughter from the audience.

The only unusual thing about this scene within the McDonagh oeuvre is that nobody is talking. Chit-chat and carnage are never too far apart in his world, as various godforsaken patches of Ireland play host to his pitch-black comedies, with their familial violence, richly profane dialogue, and inspired plot twists.

But while Mr. McDonagh has occasionally used these themes as springboards to more nuanced ideas, notably in last year’s “The Pillowman,” here he and director Wilson Milam (who have transferred the production from off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theatre essentially intact) are content to stick with grind-house giddiness. The playwright is often compared to Quentin Tarantino, and if “The Pillowman” can be compared to clever but emotionally layered Tarantino works like “Jackie Brown” and “Pulp Fiction,” “Inishmore” is Mr. McDonagh’s “Kill Bill.”

The central premise of “Inishmore” is strictly the stuff of sitcoms – Donny and Davey (Peter Gerety and Domhnall Gleeson), two villagers with about three-quarters of a brain between them, have a dead cat on their hands. Wee Thomas was the only friend in the world to Donny’s hot-tempered son, Padraic, who’s currently out of town. And so it falls upon them to track down another black cat or, barring that, slather black shoe polish over an orange one before Padraic’s return.

They’d better hope the shoe polish works: Padraic (a compelling David Wilmot), known by nearly all as “Mad Padraic,” is a terrorist so violent that the IRA wants no part of him. We meet him as he’s about to slice one or both nipples off a marijuana dealer who’s been strung up upside-down in an abandoned warehouse. (Two of the man’s toenails are already gone. Padraic points out that he actually did him a favor by slicing both from the same foot, making it easier for him to limp to the hospital.) The man’s offense? “Keeping our youngsters in a druggedup and idle haze, when it’s out on the streets pegging bottles at coppers they should be.”

Such is the political insight on display throughout “Lieutenant,” where interrupting someone else’s speech is a shooting offense. Too violent for the IRA? Form a splinter group like the Irish National Liberation Army, or INLA. (Not the Irish National Being Nice to Cats Army, as one member is forced to remind another in reference to a particular violent act.) Lose your temper and put out a group member’s eye with a crossbow? Splinter off from your splinter group.

The crossbow incident happened before the curtain goes up, as did a few cases of mom-trampling and cow-blinding, but don’t worry about feeling shortchanged. From the opening image – the contents of that dead black cat’s head spilling out – to perhaps the goriest final sequence ever devised on a Broadway stage, Scott Pask’s set is converted to a virtual abattoir.

In fact, the play’s biggest innovation in “Inishmore” is its depiction of the sort of ultraviolence that’s usually confined to the big screen. Dismemberments and point-blank shotgun blasts to the head abound, with one body after another (human and feline) crumpling into a bloody pulp until barely a square inch of Mr. Pask’s grimy set is left un-spattered.

Yes, it’s fairly shocking. But shocks can come in many different forms. They can be found in the virtuosity of the singers/musicians in “Sweeney Todd,” which has suddenly been demoted to Broadway’s second bloodiest show. They can be found in Sarah Jones’s chameleonic gifts in “Bridge and Tunnel,” in the haunting manipulation of Michael Yeargan’s seemingly naturalistic set in “Awake and Sing!,” and in the exquisite artlessness of Jayne Houdyshell’s performance in “Well.” And they were in ample evidence during “The Pillowman,” a devastating examination of violence in the service of storytelling and vice versa.

Mr. Milam wisely opts not to expand the play’s visual sense for the larger theatre. Nonetheless, now that the odds have diminished of finding blood and brain matter splash into one’s lap, some of its squirmy immediacy has dissipated.

The Atlantic production, which boasted a seamless blend of American and British performers, has moved virtually intact. The one substitution – Alison Pill as Mairead, Davey’s sharpshooting sister and a possible love interest for Padraic – is an unfortunate one. Part of Mairead’s appeal as a character is in deciding whether she’s a hard-hearted killer or an inexperienced girl trying to look tough; Ms. Pill, with her wavering accent and broad delivery, tilts the balance too far in the latter direction, numbing the im pact of the final scenes.

Otherwise, the ensemble cast has retained its crisp ear for Mr. McDonagh’s ghoulish humor. The charged banter among three of Padraic’s fellow INLA terrorists remains compelling (despite the fact that the three may as well have bull’s-eyes painted on their backs), and the chemistry between Messrs. Gerety and Gleeson has grown even stronger. Their cat-covering scheme may be doomed from the start, but their incompetence at the task somehow makes them absurdly sympathetic:

DAVEY: I do like the smell of shoe polish, I do.
DONNY: The same as that, I do. It does make you want to eat it.
DAVEY: It does. Have you ever tried it?
DONNY: When I was young.
DAVEY: The same as that. Isn’t it coarse?
DONNY: It is. And they know what you’ve been doing be the state of your tongue.
DAVEY: And then they laugh at you.
DONNY: Aye.

“The Lieutenant of Inishmore” is without question a gruesome, often outrageously funny entertainment, packed with rich comic dialogue and a satisfying batch of plot twists and reversals. (The blood and guts in Mr. Mc-Donagh’s plays often obscure his uncanny command of structure.) Visceral experiences like this don’t come along very often. Compared to his finer works, though, Mr. McDonagh is a little too content to limit this experience to the actual viscera.

Open run (149 W. 45th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-239-6200).