Black Sheep

(2007)

Dir: Jonathan King

A stampede of carnivorous sheep, crest a hill and rip into an assembled group of farmers. This to me is the most enduring image to be taken from this film. It’s a visually impressive feast, because the Weta Workshop provides the special effects. Though what makes it so impressive – is the poetic irony.

Hundreds of sheep gorge themselves on the blood of farmers. That’s a perfect visual metaphor for a completely unexpected reversal in the status quo.

Only Holy Grail comes close to it. The two films subvert the expected behaviour of fluffy, white, docile creatures for comedic effect.

In Holy Grail it is for a single joke. In Black Sheep it is for the whole movie. That the joke does generally hold out is a credit to the director and the script.

The humour of the film is a blend of the puerile and the ironic. Lots of references are made to sheep shagging, which thankfully remain implicit. The two environmentalists at the start of the film are in fact the ones to unleash the ecological disaster that causes the rabid transformation of the sheep. The infection – for want of a better word – spreads to one such environmentalist early on, a vegetarian, which makes for a darkly humorous twist. The blame for how the infection is spread is repeatedly attributed in several ways. The genetic laboratory is the source of the infection. Angus who owns the farm is responsible due to his dream of creating a sort of uber-sheep. Then you have the environmentalists who despite having moral intentions nevertheless cause the outbreak in the first place.

The film obviously draws parallels, because of its Kiwi flavour of humour, to another New Zealand horror/comedy – the excellent Braindead but Black Sheep also takes inspiration from the more recent horror/comedies, films like Slither and Shaun of the Dead. This is not a bad thing. It just means, like those films, that the film succeeds through comedy rather than horror.

***1/2 /*****