Black Sheep
Directed by Jonathan King
1408
Directed by Mikael Håfström
Shock or schlock? It’s an enterprising question. Black Sheep, Jonathan King’s refreshingly fun and over-the-top take on the sickeningly overdone zombie genre, favors wacky fulfillment of its riotous premise over calculated attempts to make audiences freak. 1408, yet another shock-and-run realization of a typically bleak Stephen King story, plays its singular plot hard and fast. Only the self-satisfied mug of John Cusack keeps the prevailing eeriness from reaching the point of overdone scare tactics. In a cinematic face-off between ghostly hotel rooms and zombified sheep, bet on the latter.
New Zealand-based director King doesn’t dismiss the idea of undead ewes and rams feasting on human flesh as a vessel for easy amusement. Instead, he allows the absurdity to reach its natural conclusion, but his precision as a storyteller results in a tightly-woven campfire yarn. Such furious entertainment gets lost in 1408; a minor idea squandered by ham-fisted details. Cusack plays a luckless alcoholic writer (standard Stephen King turf), stuck on an endless career loop, spending his nights in supposedly haunted rooms and exposing them as bunk. He catches wind of the eponymous luxury suite, embedded deep within a mid-Manhattan hotel, where no patron has lasted longer than an hour—and he scoffs. This prompts the arrival of Samuel L. Jackson, scowling and shifty as the cantankerous night manager, to issue a needlessly reflexive deterrent: “It’s a fucking evil room,” he warns.
Although the second act includes some impressively scary effects as Cusack’s character gets lost in the travails of the labyrinthian room, Jackson’s one-line sequel to the main appeal of Snakes on a Plane shows how 1408 falls short of the right balance between creepiness and self-parody. Unabashedly playful but playing it straight, the jovial narrative of Black Sheep has a better strategy: camp as high art. “I wanted it to be the A-version of a B idea,” King explained to me after his film screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival last March. “For the first few minutes, you might think that it’s a serious drama about a troubled young man. You have to establish a real world. Then, by the end, there are exploding sheep farts—things like that.”
Indeed there are: in addition to gigantic man-rams, there are castrating ewes, ear-chomping lambs and a particularly gory massacre preceded by the unexpectedly creepy image of a massive herd flocking in the direction of their helpless human victims. Black Sheep partisans have continuously noted the similarities between King’s impressive debut and the nutty low-budget mayhem that sustains Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, and the comparisons are apt. But Jonathan King also applies the subtler technique of an older forebear—Val Lewton, the visionary producer behind significant creepers of the 1940s like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie.
Lewton’s still-potent approach of top-loading his productions with a slow pace and painstakingly developed realism, followed by the jolt of extraordinary phenomena arriving during the second or third act, injects life into the base silliness of Black Sheep. A dejected twentysomething, traumatized at youth by his brother’s teasing, confronts his corporate-minded sibling about the ills of animal testing. A laboratory experiment ultimately goes awry and the expected chaos ensues, but not before King generates authentic personalities and a credible environment. While 1408 wants us to buy into its freaky atmosphere and overextends its half-baked aptitude, Black Sheep proves that, if you equip the gimmick with brains, schlock equals shock.
