Black Sheep:
Parody? Kind Of Weird? Definitely
Worth Your Time? ABSOLUTELY!
Rating: Level VI
NOT Available on Netflix - Definitely Hard To Find
Anyone who has suffered from insomnia, or even just the occasional night when you have trouble getting to sleep, has shared the experience of trying to decide if a movie they have never heard of is worth watching based on the five line description from your cable guide. Is a "silly romp" worth a few minutes of watching? Does the phrase "Brad Pitt stares in this gritty ..." make you push the select button on your remote (BTW, if a big name star is in a movie you have never heard of chances are that movie is REALLY bad)? What if you saw "a young man with a phobia of sheep returns to his family sheep farm to find his fears were justified in this horror spoof from New Zeland"? Is there any conceivable way you wouldn't watch if only for a moment? Of course there is, in fact the question is probably inverted. Fortunately I am not most people and the idea of a sheep horror movie caught my eye and I couldn't push select fast enough. And I am very glad I did.
Why was I fortunate? Well, how often do you get to see a man cowering int the back of a taxi because it is surrounded by sheep? How often does a movie try to make the sound BAAA scary? When was the last time you saw a vegetarian environmentalist become infected by genetically manipulated sheep which turns him into a carnivore and he then cries when ever he eats anything because he feels he is betraying his environmental vegetarian beliefs? Have you seen many films when another vegetarian eats a mountain oyster because they "sometimes eat seafood"? Yes, this is a film that has everything from evil brothers and scientist to a goofy, down home aunt who loves guns and is always trying to feed people hag as, the afore mentioned mountain oysters and rabbit stew.
Of course every movie of this genre will have many of those kinds of scenes and character, what separates Black Sheep is what separates every film in the spoof genre that succeeds, An indescribable sense for tone and pacing. It is a tightrope that a film maker walks when trying to make the absurd entertaining and surprising (I know that sounds oxymoronic, but it it true) and almost all fall off less than two steps in. The makers of Black Sheep make it all the way across, not without the occasional near fall and nervous moment, but they made it and that counts for a lot.
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