In 1998, “Saturday Night Live” colleagues Norm Macdonald, Frank Sebastiano, and Fred Wolf teamed up to write “Dirty Work,” a vehicle for Macdonald in which he played a prankster who put his talents to professional use by opening up a revenge-for-hire business. The comedy, directed by comedian Bob Saget, quickly came and went from theaters but found its audience on home video, where it became a beloved cult classic with famous fans like Kevin Hart, who declared it one of his favorite movies of all time on his “Comedy Gold Minds” podcast.

Yet for the filmmakers, “Dirty Work” always felt like a compromise, because commercial considerations dictated that it be released with a PG-13 rating even though it was written as an R movie. “When we wrote the movie, they told us not to worry about the rating,” Sebastiano told IndieWire. “If we had been a little more experienced, maybe we...