A movie review: Black Sheep, 2006. 70% positive on Rotten Tomatoes.

Watching this film, I can’t help but be reminded of such classics such as ‘Dead Alive’ (a fun zombie story by a little known Kiwi director, Peter Jackson) or ‘The Re-animator’ (a great mid-eighties mad scientist film starring Jeffrey Combs). The story is: Genetically altered zombie sheep are released by animal rights activists. This is terribly unlucky for Henry, the younger of two brothers inheriting a massive New Zealand farm, who suffers from acute ovinaphobia (an irrational fear of sheep – but can there really be a rational fear of sheep?) from a traumatic childhood encounter. Black sheep has it all – familial struggles, money and greed, a love story, the claustrophobic terror of spelunking in an offal pit, oh, yeah, and Zombie Sheep.

I’ve heard of this movie, but it took me quite a long time to actually see it. Luckily I caught it on IFC a couple weeks ago and taped it, so now I can strike it from my Netflix list.

Like so many other films of this kind, there is a great deal of tongue-in-cheek demonizing science and specifically genetics, because everyone knows that biotechnology inevitably leads to a zombie apocalypse.

If you don’t like gratuitous blood and guts with gobs and gobs of gore, this might not be the movie for you. And if you still can’t watch the scenes with the abominable snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,  you might want to cover your eyes from time to time because this is about that scary.