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King dives head-first into the bloody events, gleefully snapping entrails like rubber bands and spurting pus-yellow slime at every available opportunity. Black Sheep is a knowing parody of those '70s "when animals attack" horror flicks like Food of the Gods or Night of the Lepus, and a spiritual heir to Evil Dead in that it eschews screams in favor of bursts of horrified laughter. (Hostel director Eli Roth, by comparison, may claim to be after the same reaction, but takes the gore in his movies too seriously and makes the circumstances around it too upsetting.) Sheep is fun-house gore: The blood too red, the guts too rubbery, and the "villains" too fluffy — they're sheep for crying out loud — to be anywhere near terrifying. Once the surviving victims of sheep bites begin mutating into Were-Sheep (which gives King a chance for a nice nod to An American Werewolf in London, among others), you won't have any doubt that the intention is gut laughs and not nausea.

While Sheep's set-up and tone are successful, the gore is taken one step too far and, even at 87 minutes, the movie runs the premise until it's on fumes. A few nasty surprises do turn up in the final act, but King seems to be a little panicked and trying (unsuccessfully) to outdo himself. The primary villain's comeuppance, for example, oversteps the bounds from playfully over-the-top to gratuitous, and it stands out all the more because of how well the blood and guts were handled up until that point. But King loads Sheep with tons of winks to horror fans — seeing an old farmhouse boarded up and then surrounded by sheep is one of the best visual zombie gags — and the film is carried along by an abundance of enthusiastic energy that's tough to resist. You'll laugh, you'll groan, you'll never buy wool again.

— Eric Alt