“Scrap the Black Vines of Doom and Spider-Man 3 becomes a fable about how success makes monsters of us all (a story that Sam Raimi, helming one of the top-grossing franchises in movie history, no doubt knows something about.)” — from Dana Stevens‘ Slate review. Sounds like she may have been alluding to bitter Danny Elfman comment about Raimi having become a changed man between the making of the original Spider-Man and the sequel.

I saw about 25 minutes worth of Jonathan King‘s Black Sheep at the Toronto Film Festival last September (I was killing time, waiting to see something else), but what I saw and heard wasn’t bad. I laughed; I rolled with the gore. It didn’t seem quite as nimble-witted and character- driven and quick with the quip as Tremors, my all-time favorite mock-horror monster-predator film, but it’s close, or at least in the same ballpark.

IFC First Take is opening Black Sheep in the U.S. on 6.22.07, and yet the only official website I could find alludes only to the late March opening in New Zealand. Here’s the trailer — you can tell it’s pretty good right off the top. Here’s a little baahing I did a few minutes ago.

In the late ’80s I tried writing a similar-type script called Killer Chickens — a good idea (it used a very similar plot to Black Sheep re genetic engineering) but either I’m not a good enough scriptwriter or I didn’t try hard enough.