Black Sheep

2006 ****

Sheep are weird-looking critters. Not when shorn, because you can see how they're put together, and they're close enough to deer, dogs, horses etc. and you get them. But when they're sporting a full coat of wool, sheep are pretty bizarre to look at. Big four-legged wads of fluff, with a head adrift in the mass that clearly expresses a complete inability to do anything about it, or even really to care. But with the comic elements there is some creepiness, thanks to Christian armageddon imagery and those freaky-shaped pupils. Maybe, in the right context, the fluff can be like a lion's mane, framing not the face of nobility but of madness...

What Black Sheep has over other animal attack movies is that, well, most of those movies that I've seen were made in the 70s and they just tried to get the actual animals on camera and make them look menacing.

In contemporary New Zealand, where they have a healthy respect of puppets, sophisticated animatronics can be deployed for interactions with more character. As when the dead sheep foetus turns out to be not really all that dead...

For me the comedy was greatly buoyed by the sheep's reversal of nature. Sure, that's the main thrust of any animals attack movie: formerly chill animals suddenly become bold enough to expose man's hubris and, since they're doing it simultaneously, become organized like the mafia. But you have to figure most wild animals already have the ruthless urge in them. These are goddamn sheep. If you increase the "sheepness" in a sheep population, I'd figure they'd just, what? Stand around more intensely? But these sheep get angry. And once you've seen one sheep trying to kick through a door in rage, seeing a couple of them standing on the yard staring at you takes on a whole new meaning. They do stand around more intensely, when you know they also do... other stuff.


If you haven't read it already, please check out 50PageMcGee's review. This doesn't usually happen, but someone else went a good way towards writing the review I would've liked to write -- or at least I'm claiming that so I can phone this one in a little.

I initially thought four stars was a bit too high a rating, but I think Black Sheep earns it. It's not as good as the oft-compared Shaun of the Dead, but it delivers on all the fronts you would hope for, and manages a couple of small surprises.