Toad In The Hole

The British seem to have a penchant for naming foods in the most bizarre manner possible, leading to such delights as spotted dick, black pudding, faggots, and bubble and squeak - all of which are familiar to your everyday inhabitant of Little Britain but cause the rest of the world to scratch their heads and, in extreme cases, point.

Toad in the hole fits neatly in amongst these stalwarts of British cuisine, turning out to be nothing more than delicious pork sausages, browned nicely under the grill or on the stove top before being popped into a miniature lake of fat and subjected to a nice hot oven. A very hot oven, if truth be told; it needs to be hot enough to make that oil smoke.

Eventually the oil will be smoking away merrily, with or without appropriate help from the impatient chef who may well get sick of hanging about and just stick the tin onto the stove for a while. However, at this point a more thoughtful chef will have used the ten minutes wait by beating together flour, milk and eggs to produce a smooth batter - you're wondering how much of each, and I have a fail-safe recipe that stipulates equal quantities of each, including the eggs. For six sausages, I've always gone with four eggs and worked from there. This resulting yorkshire pudding batter, which some may say is a little thick, is poured around the sausages and the whole thing is returned to the oven for around twenty-five minutes. Perhaps a little longer, perhaps a little less - you can check to see if it's golden brown and crisp when it gets close to the magic twenty-five minute mark, but don't be tempted to peek too early: a disturbed yorkshire pudding is a flat yorkshire pudding, and nobody wants that.

Remove from the oven, plate it up and add onion gravy and mashed potato. Before digging in, however, note how the little sausages look very, very vaguely like tiny toads poking their inquisitive heads out of a crisp and battery landscape. You know, I have no idea who first called it that. I wish I could shake their hand. Feel free to muse on how odd we English folk are as you chew...

Brett Leonard

Brett Leonard is a film director and producer from America. A number of his films feature computer animation effects which, at the time the films were made, were considered cutting-edge and groundbreaking. The Lawnmower Man, his 1992 film, used computer animation extensively, and a second virtual reality based film, Virtuosity, continued this trend. Hideaway and The Dead Pit, on the other hand, are fairly straightforward horror films, the first an adaptation of the Dean Koontz novel of the same name, and the second featuring a zombie-infested mental health facility.

Leonard is also known for his music videos - two for Peter Gabriel, two for Billy Idol and one for MC Twist. Gabriel's Kiss That Frog video is notable for being entirely computer generated; the first of its kind in 1993.

In 1998 and 1999, Leonard worked with the IMAX 3D format, producing T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous and Siegfried And Roy: The Magic Box. T-Rex became the first 3D movie to gross over a hundred million dollars, quite an achievement when you bear in mind it can only be viewed on the special IMAX screens.

Recent films include Man-Thing, a comic adaptation, Feed and the 2007 Highlander movie, The Source. Feed slipped under the radar somewhat, but is a surprisingly complicated film which is reminiscent of Se7en, Cell and The Silence Of The Lambs, dealing with the topic of 'feederism', and once again reflecting Leonard's fascination with the virtual world and its effect on real life. Now, of course, virtual reality is passé and the new fear is the internet; Feed reflects this change well.

Selected Filmography

The Dead Pit, 1989
The Lawnmower Man, 1992
Hideaway, 1995
Virtuosity, 1995
T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous, 1998
Siegfried And Roy: The Magic Box, 1999
Texas, 2002
Man-Thing, 2005
Feed, 2005
Highlander: The Source, 2007

Piranha

1978 was a good year for horror films. Dawn Of The Dead, Halloween and The Amityville Horror all terrified entire audiences at a time. Jaws 2 was threatening to be nearly as good as the original, and The Swarm was bravely unsuccessful attempt to continue the mutated-animals-gone-mad theme. In amongst all this was Piranha.

Later, its director, Joe Dante would move on to The Howling, Gremlins, Innerspace and Small Soldiers. For now, then, it would be charitable to put Piranha down to inexperience. Piranha must, one feels, be the woeful evidence of a sharp learning curve. It's entertaining, in a way, but mainly because of its inedequacies.

A distinct lack of originality mars the film from the very beginning. Clearly taking a leaf from Jaws' script, a couple of teenagers ignore all common sense and gleefully strip off before plunging into the dark and ominous stretches of a mysterious, fenced-off pool. An entire troop of cellists immediately begin to play an appropriately dirgeful score, whilst the young chap complains bitterly about being a bit bitten. However, ignoring both the unusual nibbling and the sudden orchestral interest, the two bravely plunge on for the centre of the pool whereupon they are unceremoniously devoured. None of the cellists help, incidentally, choosing instead to perform a rousing chorus of appropriately spooky music.

This dodgy beginning quickly leads on to a dodgy middle and, eventually, a rather dodgy end which carefully leaves the way open for James Cameron's tacky sequel - yes, he's another director who has benefited from the sharp learning curve of early mutant animal horror. Within the dodgy middle portion we discover the usual stuff - secret government experiment, accidental release into large river, that kind of thing. Oh, and the large river just happens to be full of kids. And people on boats. Stupid people on boats, come to think of it, who can't seem to withdraw a limb from the water once they've realised that something's not quite right. It's the foaming and the bright red 'blood' that tips them off, albeit a little slowly.

There is only one conclusion. It's parody. It has to be. Writer John Sayles, sitting down to his first screenplay ever, must have decided to take a piranha-sized bite at Jaws and produce the perfect parody. But if it is parody, then deadpan simply doesn't describe it. There is no hint of intentional humour, no tiny glimpse of sarcasm at work. The whole film, from beginning to end is a non-stop rollercoaster of really bad horror, littered with cliche and stock characters, however entertaining it turns out to be. And it is entertaining, in its own way. Desperate for 94 minutes of fun? Then rent it, but don't buy...

Piranha was originally released in 1978, starring Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies and Kevin McCarthy. The most notable of these is McCarthy, who starred in the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Originally, Eric Braeden was cast in Dillman's part, and though he pulled out to pursue an alternate project, some of the swimming footage still shows Braeden.