Reviewed by Anne Wollenberg
Stars Nathan Meister, Danielle Mason, Peter Feeney,
Tammy Davis, Tandi Wright, Oliver Driver,
Matthew Chamberlain
Written by Jonathan King
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £19.99
DVD Region 2 | Runtime 83 minutes
Directed by Jonathan King
Henry Oldfield is traumatised for life when his brother Angus plays a cruel prank involving a nice fluffy sheep and an axe, which is immediately followed by the traumatic news that their father has died. Fast-forward 15 years and Henry (Meister) now has a morbid fear of sheep and has returned to the family farm to sell his share of it to his brother. But money-grabbing Angus (Feeney) is messing about with genetics in order to make more cash, and when two eco-warriors accidentally unleash a mutant lamb, it's shear hell (sorry).
Hang on, sheep are woolly and nice, aren't they? Screen representations of this humble creature to date include Shaun the Sheep and Casserole, the sheep the Kennedys kept as a pet on Neighbours. But these are pissed-off zombie sheep. They don't just chew the cud, they'll chew your face off. However, once you get past all the "violence of the lambs" jokes, most of which were used up in the film's taglines, what's left is just woolly. Black Sheep is funny less than half the time and scary less than half of that. It would be fine if it was just plain amusing. Non-scary horror can of course be hilarious, but this isn't in the "so bad it's good" camp. It's just bad.
You don't watch a film like Black Sheep expecting polished effects. It's supposed to look shit, so it's perfectly fine for a mutant sheep to look like someone has spliced Gollum with a sports sock. But this is no Braindead or Bad Taste. It's also no Shaun of the Dead, although it might have made a good adventure for Shaun the Sheep (with Wallace genetically engineering sheep in order to make cheese out of them, perhaps). Switch it on about 30 minutes before the end and you'll see some priceless moments, but you shouldn't have to sit through such a load of fluff to get to them.
EXTRAS ** There's a commentary with Jonathan King and Nathan Meister; five very brief and pointless deleted scenes with optional audio commentary; a two minute blooper reel that's not remotely funny; a trailer; and a half-hour "making of" featurette, in which everyone seems to be taking the whole thing far too seriously. Producer Philippa Campbell explains that many New Zealand-set stories are about paradise being lost, then found again. Sounds very profound, but this one's mainly about mutant sheep.