|
 Black
Sheep (2006)
Weinstein Company
R1 / NTSC DVD
Director: Jonathan King
Writer: Jonathan King
Starring: Nathan Meister, Danielle Mason & Peter Feeney
Review by Ted Jones
Henry is terrified of sheep, which made his childhood
difficult because he grew up on a New Zealand sheep ranch.
He wasn’t always that way, but he’s got… issues. He revisits
the ol’ homestead and falls into a situation reminiscent of
Jurassic Park, except that genetically altered sheep play
the role of velociraptor. With major nods to Night of the
Living Dead and several other films, there is very little
here that you haven’t seen before.
The outrageous amounts of gore are over the top and there’s
enough blood splashing around to make the freaks happy. The
special effects are impressive and quite gruesome at times,
done by the folks who did the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
These were live-action effects too, not CGI. Still, the best
scenes came early on, when the sheep weren’t yet attacking,
but they weren’t acting like timid sheep either. Later on,
when the flock comes pouring over the crest of a hill to
descend on an unsuspecting crowd, I was reminded of Tora,
Tora, Tora and for some reason that particular scene really
worked for me.
Probably my biggest complaint was that it felt like the
director was going through a checklist. Show this… check,
next comes that… check. This and that would then be
forgotten until needed at the climax, when they would be
trotted back out from nowhere as a solution to some sticky
problem that the characters had gotten into. All of the
action elements were present, but the movie still seemed to
drag. It didn’t help that almost every character was a
stereotype, which made it difficult to connect and care what
happened to them. |
