Enjoy this Monday with Mildred!
This is also Zombie World Tour post!
Black Sheep
What do you call a Kiwi with a thousand lovers? A shepherd. New Zealand is a country famous for its natural beauty, warrior princesses, and bad jokes about sheep. There are also some fine horror movies from the land next to the land down under, like Peter Jacksons’ Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead.
With a quick setup we find a beautiful, seaside farm on which father and sons herd sheep with clockwork precision and gleaming white teeth. Well, one son is a cog, the other is bit of a dunh dunh DUUUUUUUH black sheep. Jump forward a decade or so and the black sheep has run the family farm into a mega business and the toothy cog is now terrified of the wooly beasts and has come home to take a payout check and never leave the urban jungle again. Turns out, he’s the smart one, as we see what happens when sheep succumb to the violence of the lambs and run amok in a southern paradise.
Like the recently viewed Zombeaver, there are not only sheep zombies but human metamorphosis. This time, though, the Weta special effects are pretty darned good and would make for a scary film if you can just get over the sheer terror of undead sheep.
Generally humor should balance with scare in a horror/comedy, and the filmmakers tried to build a sense of growing doom, with many shots of undead sheep evilly watching, bloodied ewes ramming through doors and thundering flocks roaring over the hill like fluffy white Rohirrim. But everything is a little too clean and brightly colorful and even using the classics like jump scares, odd camera angles and a Wilhelm Scream can’t save the disjointed storyline.
Eventually I managed to just go with the flow and enjoyed it well enough, but I never got over the feeling that something was missing. There were a few genuine laughs and a couple of icky scenes, but X rated sheep jokes and gorgeous countryside wasn’t quite enough to raise it from Okay to Good. I will now stop struggling to leave out wool jokes and knitting quips and say you may like this better than me so you might give it a try.
LINKS:
Black Sheep Trailer
CFR: In Addition: Well this looks baaad. (Sorry I had to.)
Chick Flicking Reviews 