Black Sheep (2006)

--Reviewed by Lindy Loo

Plotline: A young man with a sheep-phobia returns to New Zealand to sell-out his half of the family farm to his brother. However, while he's home, something strange goes wrong with the country sheep and they begin to brutally attack and kill people.

Scariness factor: Impressively tense at moments--who'da thunk that sheep could be so damn creepy?

Gross-Out Factor: Pretty violent in parts, but sometimes a bit campily so.



Complaints: Nil.

High Points: I actually really enjoyed this movie much more than I was expecting. Not only did it somehow manage to make sheep really damn spooky, it also managed to balance this spookiness with a really damn enjoyable sense of humor. Even just the picture below makes me laugh out loud remembering the scene from which it's been cut. Little jabs at environmentalism and vegetarianism also popped up occasionally and actually had me laughing out loud because of the timing. And the sight of hundreds of killer sheeps barrelling down a hill towards unsuspecting victims also had me cracking up because it was so absurd and funny-looking and yet somehow rather terrifying. The special fx were also BRILLIANT and old-school which really impressed me quite a bit. There was probably some CGI snuck in there, but if there was, it was very skilled CGI because I wasn't able to pick any moments of it out. Otherwise, the transformation scenes of people into sheep as well as the attack scenes were awesomely old-school and VERY masterfully done. Think of some of the classic werewolf-transformation scenes, and you've got Black Sheep, except this time with sheep instead of werewolf shape-shifting. The acting was also the exact perfect combination of good and yet slightly over-the-top.



Overall: I really thought this movie rocked. It was both scary and yet had me laughing really hard at the absurdity of the sheep-plot as well as at the fact that they somehow managed to do such a good job at making sheep scary. If you can get your hands on it, do so. One of the better horror flicks I've seen in a while.

Grade: A