First off, it's a bit dickish of you to expect anything from a movie, isn't it? Just like trying is the first step towards failure, expectations are the first step toward disappointment. Granted, there's a certain level of expectation that comes with seeing a movie from a favorite director or writer or producer whose work you're already familiar with, or expectation for a movie based on a book or comic or toilet paper that you're overly attached to, but Black Sheep is neither based on pre-existing source material, nor is it the product of a writer-director with prior work live up. My second point, and this one's the bigger of the two me thinks, is that Peter Jackson had two features prior to Dead Alive to "hone his craft" as the douche bags say. PJ also had a pair of prior collaborators to polish the script with (that's a fucking Writers' Union innuendo if I've ever typed one), while Black Sheep writer-director Jonathan King is cutting his teeth in both fields with this movie, and on his own. My point? Who do you think you are, Richard Roeper? Don't be a sphincter. If you're going to watch Black Sheep and expect Dead Alive, just save yourself some frustration and save your friends a lot of bitching and just go watch Dead Alive again instead. As for the rest of us, let's shut up and watch.

Henry and Angus Oldfield are brothers. When they were little pre-pubescent wankers in New Zealand, Henry helped herd sheep on their dad's farm while Angus, thanks to his gimp leg, just sat around stewing in jealousy. One day, feeling particularly Henry Lee Lucasian, Angus slaughtered little Henry's pet lamb, dressed up in its mutilated carcass, and proceeded to scare the kiwi out of poor little Henry. I don't care if he was bitter as a result of being crippled, an asshole is an asshole is an asshole, no matter how well or not-so-well his extremities work. As such, we'll be referring to Angus as "Anus" for the remainder of the review. All obnoxious handicapped butt humor aside, that was also the fateful day that their dad would die in a herding accident. As a result of both incidents, Hank developed a crippling case of ovinophobia (fear of, you guessed it, ovaries!... wait... ovaries?! No, it’s the fear of sheep you 'tard!) and moved away from the nation whose sheep population matches it's human population... the big difference being that you can't tax or fuck sheep... well, you can't tax them anyway.

"15 years later", Hank returns to his native soil, where Anus has turned the family farm into a testing ground for genetic sheep experimentation in an attempt to create the ultimate Ovis (remember, that means sheep...) and little bro is there to get his half of the cut. Well, this therapist said that it would help him come to terms with his fear, but I'm sure the sizeable check that Anus owes him helps keep his knees from knocking too much. Hank also reconnects with childhood chum and fellow sheep wrangler Tucker, as well as his old surrogate mom Mrs. Mac (played by Glenis Levestam... okay, so there's another Dead Alive connection, so sue me!). Hank's real mom died giving birth to him (which no doubt adds more tires to Hank's mental instability bonfire), hence the need for fill-in mommy. Not far away, hippie couple Grant and Experience (yes, her fucking name is "Experience") take some time out of giving hand-jobs to trees so they can attempt blowing the lid off of Anus's gene tampering operation. They snag a contaminated fetus that was supposed to be destroyed, and of course nimble-fingers Grant manages to live up to his role as resident cast douche bag and drops the jar, freeing the little creeper. It bites Corporal Numbnuts and crawls off with its super fetus crawling powers so it can infect a nearby flock with a disease that turns whatever it infects into a rampaging, flesh eating, superbeast. Grant soon finds this out when he goes from vegan to blood sucking devourer of wasscally wabbits.

As for Experience, she's one of those hot hippie chicks that you can lure into bed with tofu hot dogs, a yoga mat, and a pair of hemp underpants, but once she stops using her mouth for crazy tantric sex things and starts using it to nag you into joining her for protest rallies, its time to break out a Big Mac and send her ass back to Woodstock. Anyway, she of course ends up with Hank and Tucker when the Wool Revolt starts up, so they spend the rest of the movie running from the hungry jaws of itchy doom while Grant and anybody else who gets nipped by the super mutton is turned into a humanoid sheep beastie that reminds me of Phyllis Diller's final scenes in The Boneyard. Meanwhile, Anus has a big corporate picnic to help sell his new breed of uber ewe, and the whole shindig is drown in viscera and lanolin faster than Dick Cheney belly flopping into a tub of crude... okay, so that metaphor doesn't quite work out like I'd hoped it would, but I need to throw the VP and his puppet regime under the bus now and then... until I can do it for real... :::ominous organ music here:::

By embracing his old sheep herding skills, a prop plane, and one massive fart joke, the day is more or less saved. What it all comes down to really is that city boys don't know how to operate power tools, hippies don't know how to use guns, and people in positions of power have the insatiable urge to stick their pricks into places nature never intended them to be stuck. Example? Bill Gates's wife quickly learned that if she didn't put caps on all of the electrical outlets in their mansion, she wouldn't be riding the gravy train very long. Oh yeah, and an always important tip for all of our friends out there in internet land: Mountain Oysters aren't seafood...

Black Sheep seems to incorrectly embrace the dry humor that's better left to folks like Monty Python. When you're selling your movie as a twisted gumbo of comedy gore, you need to go over-the-top with it. Sure, this goes against my whole "don't compare it to Dead Alive" rant from the beginning, but you really can't effectively pull something like that off without going balls to the wall and balancing the buckets of blood with buckets of goofy. Instead, Black Sheep feels more like a little kid trying to reach up and grab the cookie jar, but he just can't quite reach the kitchen counter. There's nothing wrong with the acting; the writing is okay albeit a little too "safe" for my liking, especially in the end (there are a lot of jokes that will either hit or miss depending on your tastes); the gore and creature effects are beautiful (no CGI here!); but it just doesn't put in that little something extra to make it the class clown that everybody gets along with. As much as I'm trying to refrain from the Dead Alive references (which you wouldn't guess considering I've typed those same two words a good 15 or so times in the last few paragraphs...), I can best sum up Black Sheep by comparing it to the David Spade and Chris Farley movie of the same name SAT test analogy style: Black Sheep is to Dead Alive as Black Sheep is to Tommy Boy - a lackluster follow-up that, try as it might, just doesn't live up to the stupefying greatness of it's predecessor. Yes, I realize that that goes against the whole point of what this review was supposed to accomplish, but... uhm... look out! Joe Don Baker's behind you and he's whacked out on mountain lion adrenaline! Run for the hills!

Now, if you'll excuse me, "Ebert & Roeper" is on and I'm hoping this is finally the week when Gene Siskel's re-animated corpse storms the show and violently sodomizes Roeper with Rick Rude's penis (inside joke) for 20 minutes while explaining how Eva Mendez's ability to still find work is a sign of the coming apocalypse. Ciao!