Killer sheep! Impenetrable accents!

Saw the 2006 New Zealand horror comedy Black Sheep over the weekend. I'd never heard of it, but when I was the DVD box picture, of a cute but bloody guy getting his cheek bitten by a sheep, I thought it might be fun, and it is. Henry (Nathan Meister, the cover guy) comes to his brother's sheep ranch to clear up some business and discovers that the brother has been conducting uncontrolled genetic experiments which lead to a strain of mutant killer sheep. The sheep have a taste for human flesh, and if they bite you, you eventually become a monstrous were-sheep. Henry (who has a sheep phobia), a lovely environmental activist named Experience (Danielle Mason), and a moderately hunky farm worker (Tammy Davis; yes, that is the man's name) try to stop the monster strain from spreading.

The film is fairly low budget, but looks good, at least partly because of the gorgeous New Zealand locations. The actors' accents were thick, so we turned on the subtitles, but seeing lines before I heard them ruins the comic timing of the punch lines, of which there are many. The film also made me think a bit about genre. It is definitely comic in tone, at times feeling like Shaun of the Dead, but it's not exactly a parody (as the excellent Shaun is). The genre conventions are all there but not really to be made fun of. As Don noticed, it's like a slightly more expensive Sci-Fi Channel made-for-cable movie (see Kaw) with lots of jokey dialogue. None of the sympathetic leads are ever really in fatal peril. The effectively creepy sheep are a mix of real animals, animatronics, and puppets, and for the most part, the effects work well (though in most close-ups, the sheep head puppet work is obvious). Scenes of a horde of sheep racing over the hills are well done, I assume with some digital work, and shots of sheep eating human guts and feet and such are both nauseating (the movie is not rated) and funny. The over-the-top moment near the end involves a killer sheep gnawing on a human penis while it's still attached to a human, which should be enough to tell you if you'll enjoy this movie. I did.