So, the other day, Frog and myself got our hands on Black Sheep.

Black Sheep is a horror/comedy film directed and written by Jonathan King. This is his first film.

In Black Sheep a genetically engineered virus is released when a couple of hippies liberate a test sheep from an animal testing lab in New Zealand. These released sheep just happen to be carrying a virus which turns sheep into murderous carnivores, and men into half-men half-sheep monsters.

The film follows a group of people trying to escape from the hordes of vicious sheep.

I know what you’re thinking. “What? These sheep do not sound like Zombies? Plus, they are sheep! HOW DARE YOU?” and I understand, but this movie is getting an honorable mention because it parody’s a large number of stereotypical zombie movie scenes and we liked it.

So what did we think about Black Sheep?

Does the plot sound familiar? It should… I can’t find much about the writers intention for this film, but after watching it, it feels like this movie is written as a parody of the movie 28 days/weeks later. I write “feels” because the parody angle is not covered beyond a similarity in the plot, and the fact that sheep have been substitued for humans. I also noticed that this film is written in a similar style to Peter Jackson’s early films such as Bad Taste and Braindead.

In my opinion what has resulted is a film with ample gore, action sequences, survival suspense and the best transformation sequences that i have seen in a long time. The film is light on obvious humor and instead relies on the out-of-place humor in the sheep for terrifying zombie substitution, which works very well.

Unfortunately the film is let down by a weak ending, which came as a terrible disappointment considering the quality of the rest of the movie.

It is my recommendation that you don’t miss this film as i enjoyed it a whole lot.

I came into Black Sheep not knowing too much about it except that it contained killer sheep and ample gore. And really, sometimes I don’t need much more than that to kill an afternoon.

Maybe because of these lowered expectations I enjoyed Black Sheep a great deal. While a little lighter on the comedy than I had expected, the scenes panning across New Zealand’s green country side past a sheep with its head buried in the remains of one of its victims can’t help but be funny.

Black Sheep gets a big thumbs up from me for having what I would call possibly some of the best transformation scenes since An American Werewolf in London. This thumbs up, though, is mostly canceled out by the final five minutes of the film that play like a tacked on happy ending. Even so, I do not hesitate to recommend Black Sheep to anybody who enjoys a fun twist on an old genre.