Film reviews: Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom | Pulp: What Do You Do For an Encore?

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ★★★★

Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? ★★★

Staking its claim on the impending spooky season’s box office a full six weeks before Halloween, Aardman’s third Shaun the Sheep movie is a mostly delightful horror-movie-themed adventure, as daft and fanciful as the amnesia-fuelled shenanigans of the first film (from 2015) and the extraterrestrial ones of 2019’s Farmageddon. In Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, the titular naughty sheep turns mad inventor with a concoction designed to supersize the growth of a prize pumpkin patch that has recently been destroyed in the run-up to Halloween by the flock’s clumsy sheep farmer owner.

The serum, however, works a little too well – their pumpkins get out of control – and when the farmer inadvertently slathers some on his balding head thinking it’s hair serum, he transforms in turn into a hirsute Big Foot clone who finds himself terrifying the inhabitants of Mossy Bottom when all he really wants to do is impress and ask out the town’s new vet.

As with the previous films, there’s no dialogue here, just human grunts and ovine bleats, all in service to an entertainingly worked-out plot that’s crammed full of visual gags and sly movie references, among them an amusing (age-appropriate) nod to Psycho and a sly riff on the pitchforks-wielding mob at the end of James Whale’s classic 1931 version of Frankenstein.

After last week’s Oasis reunion tour film comes one charting their more iconoclastic Britpop peers Pulp as they play before 20,000 people standing not in a field – per their 1995 hit Sorted for E’s and Wizz – but in London’s O2 arena as part of last year’s comeback shows in celebration of their first album in 24 years.

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Featuring all the expected 90s hits (there’s only one new track) Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? is a more straightforward concert film, but it’s a testament to the dry wit and jumble-sale glamour of both the band as a whole and frontman Jarvis Cocker that it still feels fresh.

Director Garth Jennings also gives us a potted history of the band’s almost 50-year existence (Cocker formed Pulp as a school kid in 1978), interspersing the songs with archival footage rather than new interviews to be more in line with Cocker’s belief – as he states in his sardonic narration – that “using second-hand items to tell a brand new story is pretty much the definition of a creative act.”

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is on general release from 18 September; Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? is in selected cinemas from 18 September and will also be available to stream on MUBI from 25 September

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