Review of Black Sheep (2010) by Whitney B — 25 Jan 2009

Sheep are funny. They're dull, mundane, disinterested in things happening around them and just sort of stand there. They're so boring, in fact, that they're hilarious. Just look at the Father Ted episode, Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep, where a competition is held to determine which sheep is the best. Chris the sheep is off his game, and needs to be rehabilitated using sensory deprivation tanks, boat-rides and soothing music. We soon discover that Chris is at the centre of a conspiracy to rig the competition. The comedy is derived simply from having a sheep standing there, utterly inane and uninterested, while something interesting goes on around it. It is obviously very easy to tell a funny story involving sheep.

I only make this point because, although Black Sheep seems to have a decent comedy idea at its heart, pitched as that popular sub-genre that is Horror/Comedy, it fails to get any comedy out of it. Or horror. Writer and director Jonathan King essentially recreates Night Of The Living Dead with sheep instead of zombies, but is so enamoured with the idea of people getting murdered by sheep (rather than simply menaced, which is arguably funnier) that he spends all 86 minutes of his film desperately hurling blood and guts at the captive audience. The excess is so much that, even when sheep aren't ripping people's throats and intestines out, we still cut back to a character making dinner out of - apparently - nothing but guts. Was there a quota, or something?

The plot is simple - so simple that most of the creativity clearly went into combining "Killer" and "sheep" in the first place, with little thought or originality left to legitimately string them together. An evil farmer, Angus (Peter Feeney), is genetically engineering sheep; some ridiculous Green activists trying to End The Bloodshed accidentally unleash a tiny foetal killer sheep (which is promptly forgotten about after it bites its first normal sheep), oh the irony; sheep go mad, start killing people. Stuck in the middle of this rather tired B-Movie conceit is Angus's brother Henry (Nathan Meister), a man with a fear of sheep. Now, an irrational fear of sheep is funny, because thereâ??s nothing obviously frightening about them. (See first paragraph.) A fear of sheep that are running around brutally murdering people is less funny. Black Sheep is unable to make the distinction. There are some shots, thankfully, that pit poor Henry against a couple of harmless-yet-somehow-eerie-looking sheep, and that's the kind of humour that there should be more of. Just having bloodied, people-eating sheep simply brings to mind things like rabies. And rabies is, obviously, hilarious. Right?

Eventually even the filmmakers get tired of zombie sheep, and so they throw in the were-sheep: an idea that isn't particularly funny, interesting or scary, and just detracts from the (supposed) comedy value of killer sheep. Itâ??s a pretty obvious attempt to get more life out of the one-joke premise, but it doesn't work, because people turning into (carnivorous) sheep is a completely different, even less effective joke than having actual scary sheep. It also doesn't help that the few characters who transform aren't particularly interesting. The entire cast of Black Sheep are dull and not that well acted. There's no feeling of a community overrun by sheep (even though sheep apparently outnumber New Zealanders 11 to 1), or a community of any kind. It simply feels like a bunch of sheep-themed atrocities filmed in a bunch of disparate fields and sets. There's no real tension, again because the characters are so boring, and one simply waits for them to eventually kill off all the rotten sheep or be killed off themselves. I half expected the film to go the way of The Birds, and just have the sheep win in the end. Fortunately, at the last moment, a solution is reached. It involves farting, which - after a stomach-churning cavalcade of guts and gore, and two instances of man/sheep bestiality - was probably the only disgusting thing left for the film to do. Now all Jonathan King needs to do is go back in and splice in some actual jokes. The film runs for 83 minutes as it is, and they absolutely grind by, particularly once you give up waiting for humour and realise, oh, the fact that it's sheep is the funny part. Other thudding comedy moments include animal activist and now were-sheep Grant eating a rabbit and feeling guilty about it, especially after being the idiot who unleashed the killer sheep in the first place. Oh, the satire, it burns.

This has been favourably compared to Shaun Of The Dead (on the DVD cover, no less), and it shouldn't be. Edgar Wright's zombie comedy may have leaned too far in the direction of homage, ultimately dropping the laughs just to prove the filmmakers could do it, but at least it was able to deliver actual Horror and Comedy. It had characters, funny lines and situations, and a premise that didn't run out of steam before the end of the sentence. The same is not true of Black Sheep, which lamentably confuses "gory" with "funny" and "scary", and succeeds only in being vomit-inducingly fixated with blood and guts. The enthusiasm is nearly commendable, even if it brings to mind a first year film student indulging an oversized effects budget and an unhealthy obsession with Brain Dead. But there are far superior, funnier and even scarier monster comedies out there. I humbly suggest you watch Tremors, which bothered to provide a funny script and characters along with the monsters.