“Black Sheep,” a new film from New Zealand, mates a milieu likely to be unfamiliar to American movie goers — the real world of modern New Zealand sheep herding — with the made-up world of zombie and horror movie shocks. Years after tragedy has traumatized and turned him into a cityd-welling neurotic, Henry Oldfield (Nathan Meister) returns to his family’s vast sheep ranch to accept a buy-out from his ambitious older brother Angus (Peter Feeney). Henry’s reunion with his sibling and the hard-working employees he left behind crank his blood pressure up to boiling. “It’s not about the sheep,” he defensively insists in between phone calls to his therapist, “It’s about other issues I need to resolve.”

Everyone in “Black Sheep” has issues, it seems. Henry’s brother has an issue with nature and with his late father, who was content to merely be a part of New Zealand’s sheep industry rather than dominate it. Unbeknownst to Henry, Angus has embarked on a reckless scientific quest to create the ultimate sheep. Hippy activists Experience (Danielle Mason) and Grant (Oliver Driver) take issue with the “genetically engineered devastation” that Angus’s laboratory meddling is likely to initiate. When Grant rescues a rejected super-lamb (who appears to contain “Eraserhead” baby DNA) from the lab’s offal pit, the two ecodo-gooders learn the hard way that Angus has inadvertently created a strain of cannibal livestock whose bite infects and transforms humans into were-sheep.

The tagline of “Black Sheep” —”There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand … and they’re pissed off!”— might more accurately read, “Leave no sheep joke behind!” Shearing, mint sauce, and barnyard bestiality gags are pitched with such increasingly desperate frequency that their urgent delivery eclipses the life-and-death tension of Henry’s fight for survival. It’s almost as if the New Zealand-born writer-director Jonathan King sought to purge himself of every homegrown reference point in his auteur arsenal.

Furnished with wall-to-wall horror film references and familiar boilerplate genre film twists and turns, “Black Sheep” eventually racks up so many stylistic bows to its obvious genre antecedents that it moves past the point of politeness. The film’s gleeful and facetious bloodletting, facilitated by low-tech puppet animatronics, kisses the ring of fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson’s hollow and joyless early splatter comedies “Meet the Feebles” and “Braindead.” An affectionate late film shout-out to 1980s special effects maestros Rick Baker and Rob Bottin is more engaging. When the film’s sheep-bit damned instantaneously evolve into gigantic bloodthirsty wooly monsters, their faces sprout muzzles in the same memorably analog way that Messrs. Baker and Bottin engineered in “The Howling,” and “An American Werewolf in London.”

Outside of a generally rote, Cracked Magazine level of parody, there are few revisions and adjustments to the horror movie checklist worth citing in “Black Sheep.” The most heretical genre contribution in the film may be one suspense scene’s reminder to anyone who has ever been tasked with using a chainsaw in real life, that with all due respect to Leatherface of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” chainsaws are a bitch to actually get started.

Transporting the tense sieges, grisly sudden violence, corporate malfeasance, inevitable romance, and rampant hysteria to an environment where the usual imminent perils can be thwarted by a boot scraper proves to be neither the most comfortable nor the most worthwhile journey. Unlike Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, whose “Shawn of the Dead” casts a very long and very dark shadow over this film and will likely continue to hold the high ground on any other horror spoofs for some time, Mr. King appears content to offer gory spectacle in lieu of story, and caricature over character. Dippy rather than sharply satirical, mostly gross instead of scary, and jokey more than outright funny, “Black Sheep” is notable more as a promising first offering from an energetic new writer-director than as a memorable hour and a half at the movies.