Experience: What's wrong with you?
Henry: Ovinophobia, my therapist calls it.
Experience: What's that?
Henry: (As they're being attacked by a killer sheep) Just the completely unfounded and irrational fear that one day THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN!
2007 horror/comedy film directed by Jonathan King and produced by the New Zealand Film Commission.
Henry Oldfield and his brother Angus help their father raise sheep. A tasteless prank involving Henry being attacked by his older brother who's wearing the skin of Henry's beloved pet sheep Dudley, followed by news of their father's death due to an accident, results in Henry developing severe ovinophobia, fear of sheep. This causes him to leave New Zealand and not return until his brother asks to buy Henry's share of the farm, as Angus plans to use modern bioengineering methods to create better sheep. As Henry is shown about the farm, members of an Animal Wrongs Group, Grant and Experience, steal a sample from Angus's laboratory and accidentally release a bioengineered lamb - which then proceeds to infect the rest of the flock, thus creating hordes of bloodthirsty sheep.
Not to be confused with the Chris Farley/David Spade film.
This film provides examples of:
- Attack of the Killer Whatever: Killer sheep. Really.
- Animal Wrongs Group: WEKA. Although it sounds like Grant is the reason things keep going wrong.
- Baa-Bomb: Near the end of the movie, the infected sheep have been safely corraled, but there's not enough medicine to cure them all. Multiple sheep farting makes Henry realize they have an alternative way of ridding themselves of the sheep...
- Bestiality Is Depraved: Angus is revealed to have had carnal relations with the sheep on the farm. Bonus points for it being incestuous.Henry: What are you doing?!Angus: You wouldn't understand.Henry: I understand you've got a pretty fucked up idea of animal husbandry!
- Referenced earlier in a joke between Henry and Tucker.
Henry: Fuck the sheep!Tucker: No time for that mate! - Big Bad: Angus. He traumatised Henry at a young age, compelling him to move to the city and leaving the estate to Angus. Angus then innovated the farm by setting up a lab for genetic engineering, which the scientists then exploited for their own mad purposes and created the mutant lamb that would then set off the plot of the film. After getting infected, Angus planned to travel to the city and start an epidemic, potentially turning all of New Zealand into were-sheep.
- Black Comedy Rape: While Henry is trying to cross the field of killer sheep disguised by a wool seat cover, one of the rams takes quite a bit of interest in his crawling form...
- Black Sheep: At the beginning of the film, it's Angus, who apparently can't participate in the herding of the sheep due to a bad leg. Later, Henry's ovinophobia makes him the effective black sheep of the family due to being unable to help with the family business.
- Boom, Headshot!: There's a lot of these.
- Comically Missing the Point:Henry: You've been bitten.Angus: It's nothing, just some hippy.Henry: You'll become one of them!Angus: (horrified) A hippy?!
- The End... Or Is It?: Angus and the infected flesh-eating sheep are killed and the surviving were-sheep get cured turning back into humans. But then the sheepdog bleats...
- Flesh-Eating Zombie: The sheep and were-sheep who are Technically Living Zombies will eat people alive like an addict burying their nose in coke, and anyone who survives a bite from one of them will turn into a were-sheep.
- Foreshadowing: In their youth, Angus scared Henry by wearing the bloodied pelt of a sheep he'd just slaughtered and pretending to be a sheep-monster. Years later, Angus would transform into an actual sheep monster and attack Henry, in the same barn where Henry's trauma first began.
- Granola Girl: Experience, with Grant as an even more extreme male example.
- Groin Attack: Angus gets the mother of these thanks to a sheep.
- Helicopter Blender: A variation. Were-sheep!Angus gets severely wounded by the moving propeller of the family plane.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Experience's reaction in the epilogue to learning she's eating sheep testicles.
- Inadequate Inheritor: Tucker calls Angus this compared to the brothers' father. Angus retorts with an angry, but accurate response.Tucker: Your father was ten times the farmer you are!Angus: My father fell off a cliff chasing a wool-blind ewe.
- Innocently Insensitive: After narrowly escaping a truck that plunges off a cliff, Experience remarks that she wouldn't like to fall from such a height. Henry then points out they're standing at the place where his father fell to his death in an unfortunate accident years before.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: When Angus tells Henry that he'd provided "genetic material" for the hybrid experiments, Henry calls him a fucker - Angus retorts that he'd masturbated to provide said material, prompting Henry to call him "Wanker" instead. Angus just says that it was the price of progress.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Angus and his potential investors when they see a massive herd of carnivorous sheep heading straight for them.
- Mood Whiplash: The DVD menu keeps switching between a footage of a sheep melancholically chewing its cud alternated with clips of rabid sheep attacking.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Astrid Rush, the scientist helping Angus develop his new sheep, is definitely this.
- Noodle Incident: WEKA appears to have had several of these:Experience: This isn't going to be like the salmon farm again, is it Grant?Grant: Hey, those fish died free!
- Also referenced about Dr. Astrid Rush:
Experience: Who'd hire her after that thing with the leeches?- Experience also references another one to Tucker from her early days of activism:
Tucker: [after Experience has given a long winded speech about how the Maori should appreciate efforts to preserve New Zealand's natural heritage] Learn all that at university, did you? Before you dropped out, I mean?Experience: I didn't 'drop out'; I just missed exams while we were occupying a poultry farm. - Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Mutant Zombie Were-sheep
- Not So Above It All: Despite being an animal welfare activist, Experience enjoys headshotting and running down were-sheep a bit too much.
- Not With the Safety On, You Won't: Experience threatens Henry and Tucker with a rifle before they point out that the safety is on. Having no idea how to fix it, they do it for her, and naturally don't give it back.
- Oh, Crap!: Astrid Rush's reaction to find herself stuck in a bog and surrounded by carnivorous sheep.
- Angus's reaction to a sheep biting down on a tender part of his anatomy.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: Were-sheep. Infected humans initially experience a Slow Transformation into them, and they're about as feral and flesh-hungry as the sheep are.
- Our Zombies Are Different: They're sheep! That turn humans into were-sheep! They're the result of The Virus that originated from a laboratory-mutated sheep fetus causing the mutagen to spread among the sheep via bites. The infected sheep appear to be Technically Living Zombies and are Flesh-Eating Zombies, indistinguishable from normal sheep save for the fact that they pounce on people and try to eat them alive.
- Plague Zombie: The Virus started with a mutated fetus as patient zero. From the little monster-critter, through bites the mutagen spread through bites among the sheep and crossed to humans (creating were-sheep). The most notable symptom in the sheep is ravenous hunger for human flesh.
- Raising the Steaks: The killer sheep are essentially zombie (Type P) sheep who can turn humans into were-sheep. And in the ending it seems that the virus has infected the farm's herding dog.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Angus gives Henry a short one.Angus: Look at you; a fifth generation farmer's son scared of a few sheep. You do need therapy!
- Reusable Lighter Toss: Methane and flame don't mix well.
- Sheep in Wolf's Clothing: Angus and Henry find that their infection lets them walk among the killer sheep unharmed.
- Shout-Out:
- The cage where the "uber-sheep" is kept resembles the Velociraptor container from the opening scene of Jurassic Park.
- The movie was also meant as a throwback to Peter Jackson's early horror comedy films such as Bad Taste and BrainDead, the mutant lamb especially feels like something out of those movies.
- The characters barricading themselves in a house from the outside monsters is a nod to Night of the Living Dead (1968).
- The were-sheep transformation scene is a homage to An American Werewolf in London.
- WETA did the special effects for the film. WEKA is the name of the Animal Wrongs Group in the film. Even better is that both are named after actual New Zealand animals. note
- Slow Transformation: The transformation into a were-sheep starts out as this as the initial changes are gradual, but then they suddenly speed up toward the end.
- Smoking Hot Sex: Angus locks himself, and the "prototype" of a new breed of sheep, in his study to protect them from man-eating sheep. When we next see him, he's smoking a cigarette and bottomless.
- Sweet Sheep: Horribly, horribly subverted! Henry used to like sheep as a child, until his brother traumatized him by killing his pet lamb and seen wearing his skin resulting in him developing a phobia for sheep. Not helping is the mutant lamb who infects the flock and become killing machines.
- Technically-Living Zombie: The mutagen turns the sheep into these. The Virus was created in a lab, and the sheep will eat human flesh if they get close.
- Thanks for the Mammary: Henry accidentally feels up Experience while they're bouncing in the bed of the pickup.
- Too Dumb to Live: Angus is successfully cured from the were-sheep virus, but he's so obsessed with the genetic research and his love for sheep that he runs back into the flock to get infected again, only for the sheep to devour him because he was covered in blood.
- The Virus: Besides turning the sheep into ferocious flesh-eaters, the mutagen (which is spread from host to host through bites) can cross to sheep-bitten humans, in which case it turns them into likewise-carnivorous were-sheep.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Despite being horrific monsters, the were-sheep are still sheep, and thus easily kept in check by a sheepdog.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The mutant lamb that infects Grant and the flock only has two appearances and is never seen again.
