Black Sheep

One wrong move, and these boys will have your throat out!

New Zealand. Sheep. Genetic experiments. What could possibly go wrong?

Black Sheep is a low-budget, but fun entry into the catalogue of zombie movies - and one that's carved it's own little niche by basing itself on sheep, the most numerous inhabitants of New Zealand.

I desperately, desperately want to say it was brilliant... but it wasn't. It wasn't awful, bad or even "meh" - I'd give it a "quite good" in a positive tone of voice.

I didn't have any problem with the effects (I actually rather enjoyed the use of obvious puppetry), nor with the storyline and dialogue. This was clearly a low budget effort from the off, and I'm very happy to accept that as a viewer.

Where I think it failed is that it couldn't make up its mind whether it should be seriously scary, or deliberately funny (and it's a mistake I think a lot of films in this genre make).

If you want to make a scary movie, then I think these days you have to do it really well. Cheap effects, poor  scripts, poor acting... all these things seriously detract from the quality of the film. Of course you can have humour in it - but if you want to make a scary movie, then that has to be at the core of the film you want to make.

If you're going to make a funny movie, then you have lots more leeway to use dodgy effects, an obvious storyline and predictable scary moments. But you have to be funny regularly throughout the film.

But get caught in the middle and you end up with a bit of a rubbish scary movie, and a bit of a rubbish comedy movie... and that's kind of where Black Sheep ends up.

Personally, I think they should have accepted that they were working with a low budget and therefore making a really good quality, scary movie was going to be difficult (unless they had an exceptionally talented crew, and committed 100% to the scariness throughout). I think they should have taken a good look at Shaun of the Dead and upped the humour content.

Not that I'm suggesting that "funny" is easy. Not a bit of it - it's very hard to do well (and Shaun is a harsh comparison, because that team has been together for quite some years, doing the excellent Spaced). But if you have obviously rubber sheep attacking people, I don't know that you've got much of a choice.

It's definitely one of those films that I enjoyed, but which leaves me frustrated that I'm not a movie maker myself - I'd love to redo Black Sheep and make it the brilliant film that it could be.