I don’t know if you’re familiar with this particular Urban Legend, but here it goes.  You may be aware that the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken now simply goes by the initials KFC.  One might think it’s to save cash on lettering but legend has it that the brilliant scientist at PepsiCo have come up with a special breed of cloned chickens that don’t have heads or feathers and as such they can’t legally call them chickens.  So you don’t actually say ‘give me 8 pieces of chicken’ just ‘give me an 8 piece’.  You can file this urban legend under the ‘KKK owns Churches Fried Chicken’ legend, and that the now defunct TROOP tennis shoe actually stood for ‘To Rule and Oppress Our People’ legend.  I bring this up because apparently gentical engineering is of some concern in the country of New Zealand and director Jonathan King is going to expose it all in his comic horror spoof ‘Black Sheep’.

Young Henry Oldfield is a prodigy sheep herder on his father’s sheep farm but his older brother Angus is a bit jealous of what he perceives as their father’s favoritism towards Henry.  One fateful day, Angus – who is obviously insane – slaughters Henry’s favorite sheep then wraps himself in the animals bloody woolen carcass and scares living bejeebus out of poor Henry who would never be the same. 

Now a young man, Henry (Nathan Meister), now a psychological wreck deathly afraid of sheep, has returned to the sheep farm to finalize the sale of his portion of the farm to his ambitious and still hateful brother Angus (Peter Feeney).  Meanwhile, Experience (Danielle Mason) and Grant (Oliver Driver), a pair of radical vegans, have snuck on the farm to gather information and prove that the Oldfield sheep farm is performing illegal genetic experiments on their live stock.  Ever the risk-taker, Grant grabs a vial of genetic sheep waste about to be discarded by the scurrilous scientist and finally has the

proof he thinks the pair will need to bring down the farm.  Unfortunately Grant trips and falls breaking the vial and releasing the sickest looking sheep embryo ever seen. This sheep is in like its last stages of gestation and manages to slime over towards Grant, bites him as well as a couple of other sheep which zombie style turns whatever it bites into a carnivorous flesh tearing beast.

Experience manages to bump into the perpetually frightened Henry and the farms chief herder Tucker (Tammy Davis – a man named Tammy.  Wacky New Zealanders) who try to warn Angus that there’s trouble, but Angus has a big meeting with a group of investors and refuses to call it off.  Just ask Roy Scheider and the poor folks of the shore community of Amity how ignoring the siren of the crazed nature beast turns out.  About now the entire flock of sheep has turned volatile and toss in quite a few seven foot carnivorous human man-sheep and our heroes are in quite a bit of trouble.  With the help of the pretty Experience and her firm grip on Feng-Shui, Henry will have to overcome his intense fear to put these damn sheep back in their place.

‘Black Sheep’ vacillated between a Naked Gun-esque spoof and an all out gross out horror-fest with scenes of utter abject limb ripping violence, and as such the film was oddly uneven along those lines as writer / director King might have been better served sticking with one or the other.  Or sticking completely with the spoof aspect as I don’t think even Dario Argento could make a true sheep horror movie fly.  But when ‘Black Sheep’ is spoofing, it is very funny and very clever with some truly inspired comic moments that I won’t even think of revealing to you so that if you do intend to check out this movie, you can experience it for yourself.  What always helps a comic film of this nature is that the actors play this thing completely straight, as I supposed having your foot being chewed on by a rabid sheep just ain’t all that funny to the person getting chewed on.

Along the way however ‘Black Sheep’ stops being amusing and clever and turns into ‘Dawn of the Dead’ or something, with some truly brutal scenes of gore that would make George Romero wince.  Normally I don’t shy away from violence of any type but it seemed a bit out of sorts in this film considering the style and direction it was heading in.  Obviously Jonathan King has a bit of a ways to go before he reaches the glorified heights of hyperbolae that have been so smoothly mastered by Edgar Wright and Nicholas Pegg of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ fame, but it is the young New Zealanders first time out and this film certainly shows promise.

‘Black Sheep’ is mixed bag of genre’s that unlike a Recees Peanut Butter Cup shows that two great tastes don’t always taste great together.  Or something like that.  Still, it had enough originality and humor to entertain me, which admittedly ain’t all that hard to do.