Читать книгу The Zombie Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 32

Making a highly watchable zombie movie that combines chills with laughs is not always the easiest thing in the world to successfully achieve. Shaun of the Dead was right on target, as was Zombieland. A further movie that falls into this particular category is Black Sheep, a 2006 production that was shot in the green and pleasant pastures of New Zealand. Or, rather, they are green and pleasant for a while. They soon become very unpleasant pastures, however, ones that are soaked and saturated in pint upon pint of human blood.

Transforming a healthy looking person into a violent, killer zombie is not a difficult task: make-up, ragged clothes, and near-endless amounts of fake blood work absolute wonders when placed in the right hands. In Black Sheep, however, the zombies are not people. They are, as you may have surmised from the title of the movie, sheep. Nevertheless, the company that handled the special-effects, Weta Workshop—one that also played a major role in the production of The Lord of the Rings movie-series and the television series Xena: Warrior Princess—did a fine job of turning the usually meek and mild animals into crazed, four-legged killers.

As is so very often the case in zombie movies, the cause of all the death and destruction is bizarre, and fringe-based, medical experimentation, coupled with reckless, mad scientist-style genetic tinkering. In short, the sheep find that blissfully munching on the lush grass of New Zealand just doesn’t cut it for them anymore. With their bodies, DNA, and make-up wildly altered, the woolly ones develop a distinct taste for human flesh.

Just as is the case when a person is bitten by a human zombie, after being chomped on by a savage and infected sheep, it’s best to be put out of one’s misery before the unstoppable mutation into a killer corpse begins. The main reason being that not only does the victim become zombified, they also transform into a bizarre creature that is, in essence, half-human and half-sheep. Sheebies, rather than zombies, as one might perhaps be inclined to call the infected abominations. Or maybe we should call them Baaaabies.

As Black Sheep progresses, we are treated to a great deal of dark hilarity, horror, and death as the cast, one by one, succumbs to the bleat of the dead. We also learn that the deranged soul who is responsible for all of the death and tragedy has a personal interest in sheep that goes a little too far than most of us would consider appropriate, if you see what I mean. The psychotic sheep, showing that they are not just the relatively simple numbskulls that most of us assume them to be, don’t just take out their rage on people. A sheepdog, one that has made their lives a living hell by constantly herding them back and forth from field to farm, also becomes a victim of the whitest, fluffiest zombies of all time. We know this, as in the final moments of the movie the dog utters not a typical bark but a definitive and ominous bleat.

The sheep apocalypse: coming soon to a field near you. Maybe.