Black Sheep

Screened at the SXSW Film Festival

It never got old: a sheep standing on a hillside and looking inquisitively into the distance… for its next victim! This is such a strange, incongruous image that the SXSW midnight audience went off every time — the biggest belly laughs of the festival have been triggered by shots of sheep that are more likely to be at home in a National Geographic documentary than in a gory, raucous horror comedy from New Zealand. And that, of course, is what makes Black Sheep such a charmer, at least initially: those sheep are adorable, but we know better.

The film could have ridden that concept for its entire 87-minute running time, but whacked-out writer-director Jonathan King pretty much ditches it halfway through in favor of plot complications involving people turning into enormous sheep monsters. That’s fine too, except that Black Sheep accelerates to an unreasonably busy third act that’s mostly just large-scale, and hectic, and lacking the unexpected, simple, easygoing humor of the first scenes. By the time characters started using an airplane propeller as a weapon, I had pretty much tuned out.

This is a promising debut for King, though — anyone who can wring repeated laughs out of a simple “Ba-a-a-a-a” is okay by me. And when that damned sheep tumbled into the front seat of a truck and drove itself off a cliff (“Ba-a-a-a-a”), I nearly lost it. Next time I’m in the country and I see one of those fuckers, I’m getting the hell out of dodge.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2007
Starring:	Nathan Meister, Peter Feeney, Oliver Driver, Danielle Mason, Tommy Davis, Matthew Chamberlain
Directed by:	Jonathan King
Rated:	NR