BLACK SHEEP
Director: Jonathan King Stars: Nathan Meister, Danielle Mason, Peter Feeney
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
This is no nursery rhyme, politely enquiring whether the black sheep have any wool! Rather, it is a very successful blend of horror and deadpan humour. It is as if the writer-director, Jonathan King had a dream in which he asked Alfred Hitchcock and Peter Jackson whether he could combine their influences, Hitchcock’s The Birds and Jackson’s macabre early films like Brain Dead; they must have both said yes and King went on to further dreams concocting Black Sheep.
He capitalises on the New Zealand landscapes around Wellington (and the many sheep) so that the film could only take place in this location. He draws on the long tradition of genetic experiment films so that monstrous specimens are produced – and, of course, they bite people. First off is an ideological environmental protestor who, in turn, bites the landowner and proud backer of the experiments. Then all his guests get it in the neck, so to speak – and the mad doctor and her staff. We get a variation on the Dawn Of The Dead Ewes and Rams.
This all works better than usual because it avoids the cliches of young things in peril and concentrates on the adults. It plays the horror straightforwardly as well as for laughs. With the humorous dialogue and some deadpan, audiences will find themselves sometimes really laughing out loud. And, there are a lot of NZ sheep jokes.
King’s menacing sheep are like Hitchcock’s birds – they only have to be there to be frightening. Intermingled with the splatter and the jokes, King has achieved what he set out to do.