Black Sheep

Writer and director Jonathon King has an unabashed fondness for the cinema classics Evil Dead (Sam Raimi before he went Hollywood) and Bad Taste (Peter Jackson before he went Hollywood). And King is from New Zealand, so I guess it was inevitable he would make a film about sheep with a taste for flesh. Well, he had to make a film about sheep, their lust for killing was purely optional. It’s the kind of animals on the rampage movie, with an ecological message, that was big in the seventies with films like ‘Night of the Lepus’ and ‘Frogs’.

The film’s hero is Henry, who returns to his family’s sheep farm to sell his share to his brother Angus. The dubious Angus has been working with the even more dubious Doctor Rush on genetically modifying sheep, although the good doctor has gone further than Angus realises. When two environmental protesters, Grant and Experience, release one of the mutant lambs, all hell breaks loose. One bite from the lamb turns other sheep in to killers, and humans in to weresheep. Who will survive the bloodbaath?

This film is amusing and graphic, and it is hard not to like the subject matter when they make every sheep joke imaginable and use the stunt sheep from Babe, but it should have been better. The pace is too relaxed for the frenzy of the killings. The film needed more action, more humour, and more suspense. I had seen a 28 Weeks Later the week before, so my expectation of zombie films, even zombie sheep films, was possibly too high. Black Sheep is still better than most other films I have seen recently and at least it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Is that enough reason to see it? How many reasons do you need to see a film about rampant, killer sheep?