Beyond the Multiplex

"Black Sheep": Woolly, cloven-hoofed, methane-spewing monsters must die!
These days I'll cut any horror director some slack who declines to follow Eli Roth down the dead-end path of gruesomeness for its own sake. My objections are aesthetic, not essentially moral, although you could argue that somewhere down the line the two intersect. We see all sorts of random strangers -- visiting European and Japanese businesspeople, mostly -- getting their necks ripped out and arms chewed off by mutated flesh-eating ovines in Jonathan King's "Black Sheep." Jolly good fun, I say.

King wants to sizzle your biscuits a little, like any decent horror-phile, but his bloodshed and impressive creature effects (by the WETA Workshop, of "Lord of the Rings" fame) are folded into a good-humored pastiche whose ingredients are a bit of "Night of the Living Dead," a little "Island of Dr. Moreau," a fair dose of "The Fly" and a topping of self-deprecating Kiwi humor. It reminds me more than a little of "Frogs," a 1972 movie with Ray Milland and Sam Elliott whose half-intentional comedy I did not appreciate at the time.

What's the use of plot summary, honestly? Genetic engineering experiments on a remote New Zealand farm result not just in a new breed of man-eating mutton, but also (in an unexplained turn of events) in vampire-style sheep whose bite turns people into half-sheep, half-man monsters. What else do you want to know? Does it make any sense? Of course not.

Acting is only so-so, although Peter Feeney makes a fine impression as the unctuous Angus Oldfield, who has turned his great-granddad's New Zealand sheep farm into a sinister monster-breeding facility. His estranged brother Henry (Nathan Meister) comes home after many years in the big city and becomes our hero, hooking up along the way with a vegan hippie chick named Experience (Danielle Mason), who's actually there to liberate the persecuted wool-bearers, as well as to read chakras and critique the farm's feng shui. (Special marks to Tandi Wright for her sexy, bespectacled, incorrigibly evil scientist.)

Can you really make the dullest and most docile of domesticated animals into convincing monstrosities? I don't know about that, but the effects are impressive (the half-sheep creatures indeed bear a resemblance to LOTR's Orcs) and King's action scenes are ludicrous, horrifying and gratuitous in the finest monster-movie tradition. In the larger sense, the movie plays for laughs, but the actors never do, and here and there threads of actual darkness poke through the farce. If you've ever actually laughed out loud at a "Toxic Avenger" movie, this one is for you.

"Black Sheep" opens June 22 in New York and Los Angeles; July 6 in Chicago and Minneapolis; July 13 in San Diego; July 20 in Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., Rochester, N.Y., and San Jose, Calif.; July 27 in Atlanta and Nashville; Aug. 3 in Charlotte, N.C., Detroit, Indianapolis and St. Louis; Aug. 10 in Seattle and Aug. 17 in Tucson, Ariz., with more cities to follow.

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