Black Sheep Review

Since the preview copy of 30 Days of Night is not working :-( (thanks anyway Ben, hopefully you'll send me another pre-release copy of another movie in the future! But I'll buy this one in a couple of weeks. :-p) I took the time to review a little movie from New Zealand called:

Black Sheep

They say that every time people go to New Zealand for vacation they take pictures of sheep and the hometown people just say: "don't worry about taking pictures now, you'll see a lot more of them!" hehehe Well, it seems that in fact there are A LOT of sheep in NZ and good for us on this movie, they are BBBBBBBAAAAAAADDDDDDDD... lol sorry, I couldn't resist! :-p

"Plot:" A family (The Oldfields) have a farm land that have been theirs for generations. The dad dies in a farming accident leaving his two sons "in charge." The younger one, Henry, moves away with a stress induced phobia of sheep (due to a prank his older brother played AND because of his father's death) leaving older, brother Angus in charge of the farm. The bad thing... Angus doesn't like the traditional concepts of farming and starts doing genetic experiments on the sheep... that's when things start going wrong... An animal activist steals a zombie lamb fetus and drops it by accident. As in every "zombie" movie, the thing just starts to spread...




As you can see, the plot is just as simple as it can be as it just wants to be the vehicle to get where it wants to get and that is... SHOW US A LOT OF GORE! ;-) This movie is made in the tradition of Peter Jackson movies like Bad Taste and one of my faves, Dead Alive. It successfully mixes Comedy and Horror with a lot of gore. So even if you don't care about the plot, you'll be in for a treat. The WETA Worshop did a good shop with the practical effects and in fact, I think I will not look at sheep the same way! hahaha

The cool thing about this B-movie, it mixes the zombie culture WITH the werewolves culture. So ... you should know what happens if you get bitten!

And I know this is a "schlocky", B-Movie but bottom line... is it enjoyable?
If you like movies like Dead Alive, Slither, Return of the Living Dead, etc. then the answer is a resounding YES! You'll have fun and you'll be amazed at what the WETA guys did without CGI! ;-)

Video: As far as the DVD goes, the transfer was done quite well in it's natural Widescreen format. No obvious inconsistencies were noted.

Audio: They only gave us 2 audio tracks. The main one is a 5.1 Dolby Soundtrack and the commentary track. As I don't have a full 5.1 system at home I wont comment much on the sound. I have to say though that on my 3.1 system the reproduction was quite alright and I could listen to the separation of the action from left and right.

Extras: A couple of Deleted Scenes (with optional commentary), a "Making of" feature (like half an hour worth of entertaining material), an extra "clip" especially for the DVD release, a 2 minute Blooper Reel that it's NOT really entertaining and the Theatrical Trailer.



All in all, I give the movie and DVD package a solid 3.5 Stars out of 5.

Recommended to B-movie and horror fans.