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Month: April 2011

White chocolate and raspberry cake

Easy as Pie...

By Catherine May

This cake is really simple to make and goes down a treat. I use measuring cups to measure ingredients as they make baking mega-easy for even the worst of cooks.

  • 150g (1 and ½ cups) caster sugar
  • 150g (1 and ½ cups) margarine
  • 150g (1 and ½ cups) self raising flour
  • 3 eggs
  • 150g raspberries
  • 100g white chocolate, chopped
    1. Pre heat oven to 180°ͨC. Grease and line a cake tin.
    2. eat together sugar and margarine until fully combined. Add flour and eggs and stir.
    3. Fold in raspberries and chocolate.
    4. Bake for 35 minutes.
    5. Take out of oven. Push a clean knife or skewer into centre of cake and if, upon removal, it comes out clear then the cake is cooked. If not, put back into oven for further five minute intervals until cooked.
    6. Once cool, eat cake quickly or hide it – don’t let your housemates eat it all before you’ve had ample slices.

Tip: If you really want to go all out to impress then melt some extra white chocolate and dip individual raspberries in this before leaving them to set. Once the chocolate is set, decorate the cake with them.

Plenty more fish in the sea?

Sustainability comes in large quantities

By Roshan Gibson

My love affair for fish has appropriately become something of the not so distant past. Shocking and disturbing footage broadcast on Channel 4’s Big Fish Fight has inspired me to dump over-exploited species such as cod, salmon and tuna and try my luck with other varieties of fish that have pointlessly remained unpopular largely due to their potent ‘fishiness’ or numerable bones. Many supermarkets have invested in technologies associated with the removal of bones in fish, and can now produce perfect fillets. Despite this, the consumer generally remains reluctant to embrace what local seas have on offer. This dominant consumer behaviour and the fishing industry behind it are deeply unsettling and here are the reasons why.

Half of the fish we consume comes from cod, salmon and tuna, yet the over-exploitation and continuing demand for these species means that our own stocks are rapidly declining. As a result we source the desired fish quota from other communities whose survival can often depend on them. Evidently this is socially problematic.

The second issue arises around the horrifying EU laws on fishing quotas. In an attempt to get a grip on declining stocks, quotas were enforced as an attempt to prevent the over fishing of popular species. The unforeseen result was an improvident nightmare; commercial fishing techniques imprecisely plough the sea, gathering numerous species that exceed their quotas. Landing fish that are not contained in their quota is a breach of the law and as a result, fishermen are forced to discard up to 80% of their dead catch back into the sea, annually wasting up to 1 million tonnes of fish in the North Sea alone. The laws do not aid declining stocks; in fact they have instigated a further moral crime.

Furthermore, there are dilemmas associated with aquaculture, found most controversially in the farming of salmon. In order to produce one kilo of farmed salmon, you need to feed it three kilos of wild fish such as sardines, herring or anchovies. This is how salmon achieves high levels of Omega 3. As the salmon farming industry expands, increasing amounts of wild fish are needed. These are extracted from the sea, leaving wild salmon extremely hungry. Current approaches to salmon farming not only threaten wild salmon and their ability to rejuvenate but also destroy populations of smaller wild fish whose prominence is vital to the food chain.

Lastly, but by no means least, are the concerns about decreasing tuna stocks. In a report last year from the WWF, if fishing continues at current rates, the Atlantic bluefin tuna (which can accelerate faster than a Porsche) would be “functionally extinct” in less than three years. These fish are a major part of people’s diets all over the world, yet globally their populations are being dangerously jeopardised by fis0hing techniques called FAD (fish aggregating devices.) These ships or mini factories are accountable for 70% of the world’s tuna fishing, and capture a large variety of unwanted by-catch such as sharks, dolphins, skate and turtle. A large proportion of the tuna caught with these methods will be made into tinned tuna or will be exported to sushi restaurants all around the world; devastating tuna populations. The haunting element in all of this is that if we can’t change our consumer behaviour now. Using tuna for sushi will be as impossible as a dodo roast dinner.

Our failure to change consumer behaviour will result in some of our most loved and delicious species becoming fully exploited. Campaigners are not asking consumers to never eat popular species again, but to reduce the amount we buy and try to become more adventurous with a wider variety of sustainable (and cheaper) fish such as coley, hake, mackerel, whiting, pollock and sole, just to name a few! The consumer, and student alike, must play a central part in radically transforming the crisis in our oceans before it hits our plates.

Look out for the label below on any sea food you buy from a supermarket, and sign the campaign to end discards at http://www.fishfight.net/

You are what you drink

Defining who you are in a bottle

The foster lad
Beer is beer. Well that’s the mentality of the Foster/Carling drinker. As long as when you’re holding it everyone can see that you’re not a wuss and are drinking a super masculine drink of pure virility everything is proper “banter.”

The WKD bad boy
Blue is the colour for the WKD drinker, it matches the Ralph Lauren polo and Corsa. It’s Wayne Rooney’s favourite drink – and what a man to aspire to be.

The whiskey wisher
Aren’t you just the gruff yet refined classic figure of a man, mulling over your whisky, having it straight because you can handle it. Who do you think you are? Face up to the fact that you are fighting the urge to wince with every sip and pour a big splash of nice sugary coke in there to ease your suffering – ahh that’s better isn’t it?

The vodka gal
You’ve got the girlies round for drinks before the big night out: the mini skirts have been dragged out the closet, and fake tan has been applied. And why not match your tan and your drink? Purchase some tropical fanta, and go in half and half with some Glen’s from Gaffs. The saccharine burn of fructose and ethanol will soon be numbed after the first five glasses. You can then feel free to sing along to some R’n’B classics.

The jaeger rocker
God gave rock and roll to you. He also coincidentally branded and marketed an alcoholic beverage specifically for your social stereotype. You can drink straight out of the bottle until you pass out into a wet dream about playing Wembley.

The red bull (and anything alcoholic)
Keep running at 110% by combining an artificial stimulant with a depressant. It’ll help keep you awake and drunk so every can enjoy your idiotic state for longer. It will also ensure your system gets a proper flushing the next morning – hot.

The strongbow and black sweet tooth
As if Strongbow was not sweet enough already, you have been able to have the amazing insight to combine it with blackcurrant flavoured concentrated sugar water. Now it just tastes just like fizzy Ribena, what a result! You could even give it to a five year old and they’d love it, couldn’t you? Except don’t do that. Don’t even joke about that. Why would you bring that up?

The pretentious ale conniseur
Who are you trying to impress with your apparently “expert” knowledge of ales, your Grandad? No one cares about woody undertones or hoppy highlights, you booze boffin. Go back home to your Warcraft account and collection of woollen vests.

The cocktail cock
Cocktails are for people who wish they were interesting enough to be in a movie, but unfortunately they are just ordinary nobodies. White Russian? Just a tit who thinks they are “the dude”. Vodka Martini, shaken not stirred? Get fucked.

The non drinker
Nobody can like orange juice that much.

Sustainable Mackerel Salad

A sustainable dinner

By Isaac Cameron
A guilt free fishy dinner to remind you of brighter days.

As people become increasingly concerned about the stocks of wild fish like cod, tuna and salmon it’s good to give them a break and switch to a more abundant fish like mackerel. Try and make sure the mackerel is MSC approved as it guarantees that it is fished using sustainable methods.

serves 4

£1.31 per person

Ingredients

  • 3 fillets of MSC approved peppered smoked mackerel skinned
  • 2 cox apples
  • 500g charlotte potatoes
  • 1 bulb of fennel
  • 2 red chillies
  • 3 lemons
  • 5 spring onions
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 bunch of parsley

Method

  1. Wash and slice your potatoes into about 1cm rounds, put in a pan of boiling water and cook for 10-12 minutes, or until cooked through.
  2. Whilst the potatoes are boiling take the apples, cut in half, core, thinly slice and place in a large salad bowl. Once sliced, squeeze the juice of half of one of the lemons to stop the apples discolouring.
  3. Next cut the fennel bulb in half, de-seed the chillies and thinly slice both along with the spring onions then place in the bowl with the apples.
  4. Once the potatoes are cooked, drain and run them under cold water for a couple of minutes to cool them down, then add to the other ingredients in the bowl.
  5. Now roughly chop the parsley, flake the smoked mackerel and add both to the bowl.
  6. Finally squeeze the juice of the remaining lemons into the bowl, add the oil, mix everything together and season to taste.

Event Review: Cornerhouse’s 25th Birthday

It was Cornerhouse’s 25th birthday on 25th September, and to celebrate they held an ‘80s party called ‘It was acceptable in the ‘80s’ (why does everybody keep saying that? What was acceptable in the ‘80s? Invading the Faulklands?). It started off with a choice of classic ‘80s films, and everyone went to see The Goonies except me, a move I quickly regretted. Insignificance seemed more attractive at the time, and was also a movie I hadn’t seen approximately a billion times. It’s about a man who is clearly supposed to be Einstein and a woman who is clearly supposed to be Marilyn Monroe who nearly have sex but don’t. Weird. After the film there was a quiz about the ‘80s and I literally didn’t know a single answer, but everyone was given a donut for taking part. Guiltiest donut I’ve ever eaten. The donut of shame.

  The party then moved upstairs and it was all free drinks and dancing Ghostbusters. Actually, after the two free drinks it reverted back to mad Cornerhouse prices, so getting battered wasn’t really on the agenda. It would’ve been a little weird anyway to be honest; the crowd at this party were overwhelmingly those who idolised Bill Murray when they were seven, but who are now kind of balding and forlornly picking at their glittery suits over a mug of red wine. The party was a bit lamely decked out and no massive effort had gone into the decoration of the place. There was also the quite fundamental problem that there was no good music in the ‘80s. True story.

Verdict: Members of the Breakfast Club might have enjoyed this but as a member of the Pokemon club this didn’t offer a great deal. Noughties Ferris Bueller would’ve truanted the fuck out of this.

Steve Jones, Film Editor

Interview: Mark Kermode

Mark Kermode

Eons ago, the country’s most famous film critic Mark Kermode wrote for the very paper you’re reading. Now he’s written a book: It’s Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive, he’s touring round the UK, he’s in a band, he regularly appears on Newsnight Review and he’s got his own radio show with Simon Mayo. Need any more reasons to write for The Mancunion? I contacted the former University of Manchester student to talk Horror, Hulme, and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film.

An enthusiastic start, Kermode kicked off the interview by talking about his time in Manchester as a student: ‘I lived in a housing estate in Hulme. It was pretty run down, but there was a very creative atmosphere. All the students seemed to be in bands.’ Was he in a band at this point, I asked. ‘Yeah. We were called The Railtown Bottlers. I’ve actually never not been in a band.’

‘It was around this time that I started to write for The Mancunion. In my day, we paid our way into everything, sent in a review and picked up the paper hoping our article would be in there.’ He went on: ‘It wasn’t nearly as regulated in those days.’ Well, readers, now everything is free and your article is likely to be published, therefore disproving once and for all the theory of the ‘good old days’. Interestingly, Kermode didn’t actually write for the Film section; ‘I wrote gig reviews. I remember the first one I did: The Higsons, with Charlie Higson. Also, Orange Juice.’ Well, everybody has to start somewhere.

‘At the same time I also wrote for City Life in Manchester, and I went on to write for NME. It was all very open back then, I seemed to just waltz in everywhere and be given work. It’s not like that now. I don’t know how on Earth you’d become a critic today.’ I asked him how he did it, specifically. ‘By lying basically. I lied and blagged my way into everything and now here I am.’ I was glad to hear the only true method for going through life confirmed by someone like Kermode; ‘I remember claiming to have loads of experience on the radio, being thrust in front of a microphone and being told to talk on air.’ I wanted to move on before he told me he his name wasn’t even Mark Kermode or something.

I asked him what he would call his book; it’s not really a biography, though it reads like one; more a compilation of anecdotes and a timeline of the films he’s seen in his life. ‘Well, I started out writing about my thoughts on films, and it kind of just turned into that. All those anecdotes just seemed to fit’. At the end of a lot of those anecdotes, he says ‘but that didn’t really happen’, or something along those lines.

I asked him about this; ‘I recorded all those stories in my book as I remember them. My memories have become so distorted; I don’t even know if they really happened any more. That’s what happens; you corroborate the evidence. Once at a desert shoot in LA, my band was supporting this terrible metal band. We hated them. I remember turning the wind machine on them and blowing the drummer off stage.

After I published my book, my friend said that that didn’t happen, and that only some of the drum kit was blown over. I came to realise that my memory must have been influenced by a scene in Slade in Flame’s movie, where the drummer is blown off stage.

It’s just like what Edward Woodward once said to me, when he was on the set for The Wicker Man – they didn’t have enough flowers for a shoot where he was on a horse drawn cart, so every so often the crew would stop filming and move previous flowers in front of the cart. I asked the crew on the film about this, and they say that it definitely didn’t happen, but when I went back to Woodward he absolutely insisted that that’s what he remembers. I understand completely, especially when you’ve seen as many films as I have – they start to encroach on your real life. That’s what my book is partly about, really.’

Kermode spent his childhood in the cinema. He is a massive fan of the horror genre, particularly The Exorcist, and even says in his book that ‘I don’t think there is a spiritual element to human life, I know it because I have experienced it first hand, and I have horror films to thanks for that’. Kermode commented on this remark: ‘Some people get football. I don’t. Some people understand Opera. I don’t. I really get horror films, and I think when you find your niche as I did with horror it can be genuinely transcendent. Horror cinema is kind of about that anyway – it is spiritual, in a way. It’s wishful thinking. I mean, if the day comes when hundreds of zombies come crashing through your window, well, then at least that means there’s an afterlife.’

I asked if this spiritual side he feels has anything to do with the fact he’s a church-goer. ‘Maybe. I don’t think you can feel that transcendent side of it without having some interest in religion. I don’t believe in demonic possession or anything – I just have a connection to horror films that borders on religious.’ He named some of his favourite horror films, such as Onibaba, Eraserhead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I wondered if he liked any of the more modern horrors; ‘Well, to me, those films are modern. You just don’t think they are because you’re a child.’ Can’t argue with that. For any of you wondering though, he hates the Saw movies.

He’s doing a tour of the UK at the moment, to coincide with the release of the paperback version of his book. I wondered what it will entail. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what it’s not going to be. It’s not going to be me just reading from my book. I don’t get book readings. What’s the appeal? My show is closer to stand up comedy, I suppose, with references to what I’ve written in ‘It’s Only a Movie’. I’m really looking forward to my Manchester show. I didn’t do one on my first tour in February and it’ll be a big moment for me, returning to talk in the city where it all started.’

Kermode’s tour comes to Manchester on 23rd November, and tickets are £10 on ticketline.com. He’ll be doing book signings after the show too, so it’s a must for fans. I finished off by saying that I was looking forward to his review of Pirates of the Caribbean 4; Kermode HATES Pirates of the Caribbean, just check out his review of the third one on Youtube. ‘(Laughs) You can’t pre-judge these things. They might have re-invented it or something. You have to go to a film with an open mind, no matter what.’ A truly objective critic, if ever I saw one.

Kermode came across as very honest and friendly, and it’s nice to see that his level of stardom hasn’t made him forget his roots at The Mancunion. His advice to all us budding critics on the Film section was ‘watch films to the exclusion of everything else, live in the cinema and never, never second guess the audience’. You heard it from The Good Doctor here.

Steve Jones, Film Editor

I Hate: Shrek

Shrek

 I hate Shrek. No, really, I hate it. And not in an ‘I hate carrots’ kind of way, but in a full blown, screaming-as-you-pull-your-suitcases-out-the-door, ‘I hate you and your mother and that tattoo of your ex’s face that you have on the inside of your thigh’ way. But the thing is (as I’m sure you’ll know) the only way to get to that kind of hatred is to really fall in love first.
  I was eleven when Shrek came out in the cinema. My brother, my parents and I went to see it, and within 90 minutes it had become my favourite movie ever. It was cool, because, c’mon, he’s a massive, sarcastic, Scottish ogre, and it was good fun too (hell, I didn’t know that the talking donkey liked to spend his money on transvestite prostitutes). Frankly, it was a beautifully self-encapsulated semi-satirical masterpiece, or, as I put it back then; one fucking funny film.
  The thing is, like most things in life, Shrek was ruined for me by the secondary education system. I’m sure my school had other DVDs; I saw them hidden behind big books on the top shelf; but, when it came to the end of term and the teachers got too bored and jaded to teach us anymore, they would play one film over and over and over again. My film. Shrek. Now I can’t tell you the seven times table, pick out the Noble Gases or recite one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but I can remember, word for word, the first fifty-five minutes of that film (the length of one lesson). And I’ll tell you what: it’s just not funny anymore. The sequels, well, they were just salt in the wound. It broke my heart. So, now, I hate Shrek.

Bill Knowles

I Heart: Into The Wild

Into The Wild

 Henry David Thoreau once said, ‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth’. This movie is based on a true story; it follows a man named ‘Christopher McCandless’ in his search for ‘the truth’ and a life with nature. After graduating from university, Chris donates his life savings of $24,000 to Oxfam International, takes his ‘trusty’ yellow Datsun and begins his big adventure. He adopts the moniker ‘Alexander Supertramp’, and chooses to live a simple life away from the ‘empty, materialistic society of America’ (his opinion, not mine, although a bit of peace and quiet is probably high on everyone’s list after a few years at uni). Luckily, we, the viewers get to go along for the ride, from Mexico all the way north to Alaska.
  So why do I love this movie? The film is true (see the theme developing?) to the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (a must-read). Sean Penn does a stellar job as director; encapsulating the mood of the movie with great cinematography and a brilliant cast. I was constantly blown away by the location shots of North America; one particular scene in which Chris is running beside wild horses really sums what I’m talking about. How Emile Hirsch (our Chris for intense and purposes) wasn’t nominated for an Oscar still baffles me today.
  Other notable performances include Hal Holbrook (who was nominated for an Oscar) who plays ‘Ron Franz’; he might even get those tears flowing in the manliest of men. Another reason to love this movie is Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam who provides the soundtrack. So what more do you want? ‘Vince Vaughn’ I hear you say? Don’t worry! He’s in it too.
  You should watch this movie because, as cheesy as it sounds, it may actually change your life. I’m not saying follow by his example, but his philosophies are challenging.

Michael Lyons

Top 5: Films to look out for in 2011

Thor

1) Thor – (May) – British, Shakespearean actor and director Kenneth Branagh brings his prowess to comic book territory, with an interesting cast including Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins and Idris Elba (aka Stringer Bell from The Wire).

2) The Tree of Life – (May) – Up and coming director Terrence Malik pushes his second film in six years. Brad Pitt and Sean Penn star in this story of an eldest son of a 1950s mid-west family and his relationship with his father as he comes of age.

3) 127 Hours – (Jan) – Danny Boyle’s follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire is said to be a real life story of a mountain climber trapped under a boulder and forced to take extreme measures to survive. It stars James Franco and has been garnering plaudits and admiration on the film festival circuit. Watch out, Touching the Void.

4) Hugo Cabret – (Dec) – Scorsese’s first 3D kid’s flick is about an orphan who lives in the walls of a 1930s Paris train station and is involved in a mystery concerning his father and a robot. Or something like that. Newcomer Asa Butterfield stars with Chloe Moretz, Sasha Baron-Cohen, Jude Law and Christopher Lee. Another interesting cast.

5) The Fighter – (Feb) – True life story of boxer Mickie Ward (Mark Wahlberg) helped by his drug imprisoned brother Dickie (Christian Bale in ultra-thin mode) to become world champion. Directed by David O. Russell (Three Kings) this film promises to be as explosive on set as off.

Aman Somal

Top 5: Movie monsters

Hannibal Lecter

1) Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs) – Okay I know! He’s only human but definitely deserves a special mention. In my opinion there is nothing more terrifying than a psychopath criminal who wants to eat you, but somehow looks like the sort of guy your desperately lonely mother would bring home as your ‘new father’. Talk about awkward atmosphere at the dinner table. ‘More liver anyone?’

2) The Infected (28 days later) – Ah Danny Boyle, you have given us so much! Slumdog millionaires, incontinent crack heads, and most of all, ‘Rage’. The beautiful little virus that combines the best of Tourette’s syndrome with rabies, showing us that zombies need not be the unbearably slow, flesh-craving OAPs of Land of the Dead.

3) The Cave Dwellers (The Descent) – Lots of people are afraid of going into caves. Some people are claustrophobic, others afraid of the dark. But most of the time it’s because there is a grotesque race of albino humanoids with a taste for flesh just waiting in the darkness.

4) Jaws (Jaws) – Torpedoes are scary. Torpedoes with teeth are shit scary. What about a 25ft killer shark with its own tense background music and a taste for anything that happens to be under water, or even just slightly wet for that matter? Yeah that’s pretty damn scary too! Warning; a bigger boat may be required.

5) The Alien (Alien) – Never ignore Sigourney Weaver if you value the lives of your colleagues and/or cat. As if having a giant spider attached to your face with its penis down your throat wasn’t bad enough, your chest will probably burst open at the worst moment, possible producing a terrifying dot on a radar scanner that will stop at nothing to eat you with its deadly tongue.

David Pettifer

I Heart: Witchcraft

The Hoff

  Once upon a time, during my first week of life as a fresher, I was introduced to a film that would remain lodged in my memory for the rest of eternity. As a break from the obligatory uni bingeing, we decided to have a film night, and to appeal to the masses, we went for The Shawshank Redemption. ‘Flatmate A’ (who will remain anonymous for dignity’s sake) returned with her boxset of 4 “Classic” Films, which contained an ominous-looking film named Withcraft on the reverse of the Shawshank disk. Intrigue led to viewing, and what followed certainly didn’t disappoint.
  Witchcraft is set in a misty area of Massachusetts, on a small island which is said to be haunted by the many witches that had been put to death there during the infamous witch trials. Gary, played by David Hasselhoff (Yes, The Hoff made it into this masterpiece!) and his virginal girlfriend decide to go to the island to further their studies in witchcraft, which, naturally, leads to them and some other insignificant characters being launched into a frenzy of paranormal activities and laughable gruesome duels; one has their mouth sewn shut in a satanic basement, one unfortunate soul’s jugular magically bursts all over the Hoff, and one is sucked down the plughole into sewage pipe oblivion. Needless to say, this film would be genuinely stomach-turning if it wasn’t so hilariously bad. There might have been a bit more plot in there, but I probably missed that whilst wiping away tears of laughter.
  I cannot urge you enough to ignore the 2.7/10 rating on IMDb, if only to see the ending. It’s too good to spoil now, but let’s just say that His Royal Hoffness certainly goes out with a bang. Goodness only knows who decided to put this on the same humble disk as Shawshank, but whoever they are, they deserve a round of applause for providing me with a side-splitting 95 minutes of euro-genius. Shelve the psychological thrillers and enjoy some mockery of late 80’s horror instead this Halloween.

Emma Martindale

I Hate: The Saw films

Saw V

  A lot has been said about the desensitisation of audiences to gore and horror. In the last decade, our preoccupation with our own desensitisation has been escalated, thanks to a series of ‘gorenography’ films; horror flicks that spend most of their time showing us grisly, disgusting deaths, maiming, and quite often some of the most startlingly repulsive images we’re ever likely to see. Recently the subgenre has descended to farce (The Human Centipede) and taken a shot at high art (Antichrist) but the jewel in the gorenography crown, the one that keeps bringing the money in, is the Saw franchise.
  But let’s forget about the ethics of desensitisation for a second. Why is it that we’re so unaffected by such theoretically shocking images? Could it be the fact that every time something horrific is about to happen, the suspense is fried by cinematography which jumps around the room on a sugar rush, hammering home that this is scary, and simply doesn’t have the bravery to let the camera sit and watch? Could it be that we’re too busy as an audience trying to figure out where this scene belongs in relation to the rest of the franchise, or whether we’re even supposed to have figured that out yet?
  Or maybe it’s because the actors, lumbered with a script that trades dialogue for character exposition, simply don’t have it in them to make us care that they’re about to be eviscerated, immolated or indefinitely incarcerated. Movies that didn’t suffer from all of these problems wouldn’t have us sat there, complaining that we’re desensitised.
  It’s Halloween, and Saw 3D is out. It looks at least to have had some real money spent on it. Whether they’ve fixed some of the more important problems is another issue.

Alex Little

Battle of the Beasts: Zombies

"Run!"

You’re running through a deep, dark wasteland, pursued by an unspeakable terror. You can’t get away fast enough, and for some reason your every move is punctuated by gothic choral music. But then a thought occurs, and you stop. Why are you running?
  Zombies are the walking dead, scary precisely because they cannot be reasoned with or persuaded. If it’s a zombie that’s chasing you, there’s no messing around with the business of exacting justice on their killer. Unlike a ghost they won’t spend most of their time attempting to communicate with you. There’s no tortured wolfman psyche, pontificating over the consequences of their actions. If you’re particularly unlucky when a vampire gets you, it may well try and come onto you.
  The only way to stop a zombie from committing an act of violent horror on you is to commit an act of violent horror on a zombie, and this magnificent equation keeps any zombie movie protagonist dead or deadly; a great set up for some dark situations. Think of 28 Days Later, or Shaun’s mum in Shaun of the Dead.
  Zombies themselves have no morality, and that’s part of their appeal, but they make for good social commentary. George A. Romero’s ‘Dead’ series handles consumerism, Vietnam, and American culture at large. By definition they operate en masse, and that means that no matter how long you flee, how far you run, you will never be free. Sure, they might take a while to get to you. If they’re Romero’s, it may be quite a while indeed. But when Zombies catch up with you in that wasteland, at least you know they’re going to rip your head off and chew your brains out. Nice and simple; and at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want?

Alex Little

Battle of the Beasts: Werewolves

Wolfman

  So it’s Halloween and you and your flatmates sit down to enjoy a couple of scary movies. But Which do you choose? Well definitely not Land of the Dead with its dull plotline and zombies that appear to have escaped from the local care home; nor Blade with its ridiculous action sequences, and lack of style no matter how hard it tries.   The movies you pick aren’t any of these; they’re more than likely something like Underworld, An American Werewolf in London or Dog Soldiers. Three well-made movies that combine action with horror, in a way that most of the mass produced horror flicks fail to do. But what makes these movies so good?
  It’s that howling mass of hairy, blood-thirsty muscle that we call the werewolf. From the tall, aggressive beasts of Underworld, with their savage teeth and a preference for fresh meat over Pedigree chum (no matter how moist the chunks are); to the harrowing eyes and lanky frame of the surprisingly chilling Professor Lupin (Harry Potter), werewolves have been haunting us in the cinema for decades. We’ve seen many incarnations of the classic mythological beast, and with every film there comes the absolutely unique transformation scene. Werewolves instil us with a deep primal fear, born from a natural terror of the pack animal, and in movies this lasts right from the very first howl to the last silver bullet. Lycanthropes are the perfect metaphor for human weakness; a lack of self-control over our basic animal instincts and our ability to inflict this upon others. The perfect movie monster is the one within us all. And I think you’ll agree that there is no better cliché in the horror movie industry than a pitch black sky, a full moon and an eerie howl echoing from afar.

David Pettifer

Battle of the Beasts: Monsters

Rarrrrwww!

  Of all the film scenes throughout history, nothing has ever matched the simplistic chill of Jurassic Park: A single coffee cup, shot up close as it ripples with the heavy footsteps of the approaching T-Rex. Why does this single image continue to instill so much dread in the general public? Because monsters are big. Really big.
  Monsters take us back to a less evolved time when our ancestors spent their days looking over their shoulders because we weren’t quite so sky-high in the food chain. They scare us in a way that other creatures can’t because they come at us on a primal level. When Godzilla, (being the only word to this day that you can pronounce in a corny Japanese accent without appearing politically incorrect), appears on the horizon, your first reaction isn’t to search for the good inside his soul, (sodding Vampires), but to leg it away as fast as you can, preferably screaming inanely as you do. Monsters have the power to level cities and pluck up their citizens like KFC popcorn chicken. It takes whole swarms of the undead to raise a town, but any half-decent monster could manage it in an afternoon. They’re lurking under our beds, at the bottom of caves, and in any semi-decent toxic waste facility.
  Monsters also have the horrible knack of leveling the playing field; all the animals you abused as a child now reappear 50ft tall and attack you in late 1950s B-movies – ants, spiders and – erm, women! All we fear deep down is just one radioactive leak away from being our newest predator and there’s nothing any of us can do about it, because at the end of the day, we’re all just something stuck between their teeth.

Mark Pettit

Battle of the Beasts: Humans

Humans

  We all love monsters, vampires, zombies, and so on and they’re fun (if you like to laugh at the improbable) but the truly memorable characters from horror movies, the ones that send a shiver down every viewer’s spines are the humans.
  Throughout the history of film we have had many unforgettable performances, so I’m going to limit myself to a more recent incarnation. Over the last few years with Hostel, Saw and an onslaught haphazard remakes, we have only been blessed by a few exceptional men and women, peppered over the monotonous nonsense we call modern horror. The most recent edition to the hall of fame is Woody Harrelson’s baseball bat wielding ‘Tallahassee’ in Zombieland. This foulmouthed, full-hearted Texan captured the mood of an irreverent modern Zombie movie which didn’t play to the conventions; smashing up Zombies left and right in an increasingly creative and hilarious fashion.
  Women made the transition from damsel in distress to kick-ass heroines in ‘The Descent’; the frightened teenagers of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ were anything but heroic (although they did make the most hardened of horror fans squeal with their realistic portrayal of shit-scared idiots). The ultimate modern humans in horror however are undoubtedly ‘ZomRomCom’ heroes ‘Shaun’ (Simon Pegg) and ‘Ed’ (Nick Frost) in ‘Shaun of The Dead’. Any horror protagonists who defend themselves by hurling old records at zombies (after firstly mistaking her for a pissed-up bird) are exponentially the modern horror idols.
  These are the good guys, the ones that fight for the human race, so don’t even get me started on the baddies. Hannibal Lecter, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers; these guys are happy to slice you and dice you in all manner of interesting ways. Slasher films (think Saw) have reality on their side, somehow it’s much scarier knowing that the deranged psycho killer that stalked that group of teens (not unlike you and your flatmates) wasn’t a supernatural abomination but a regular Joe-gone-crazy.

Aman Somal

Battle of the Beasts: Vampires

Dracula

  Vampires. These bloodsucking creatures have been the villains and sometimes the heroes, of films from the dawn of cinema; their power to both scare and enthral us remaining to this day.
  There are two main portrayals of vampires in film: the sophisticated and sexy look, popular in the many of the older films; or the violent, and often mindless, killer blood-addicts. Unfortunately the Twilight saga has given us a new breed of vampire: the caring, sparkling softie who pushes Mormon values. It would be easy here to go into a rant on why the Twilight films are so terrible, lacking any depth and good acting. But I won’t.
  Twilight should not overshadow how vampires in film can be terrifying. Here we need to mention Béla Lugosi, if you don’t know who he is, then go ahead and do an impression of Dracula now. You probably just said something like ‘I vant to suck your blood’ (complete with the terrible fo-Transylvanian accent). That’s Béla Lugosi’s famous voice you just impersonated, a performance is so well-known that when he died he was buried in his Dracula costume! The Lost Boys is another great vampire film, here the vampires take the form of a gang of teenagers that terrorise the local town. They are the cool bad-asses that we all wanted to be at that age (but weren’t as we were probably inside watching vampire films at the time).
  The lack of any good, recent vampire films is probably due to the Twilight craze; and once all the Twi-hard, Edward-loving girls grow up, I hope that we return to the more traditional image of vampires; those terrifying monsters that swoop into your bedroom at night and rip you to pieces, not read you love poems.

John Milward

Top 5: Dodgy Disney characters

1) Captain Hook – I know that technically, he was created by J.M. Barrie, but the strangely Elektran relationship that he has with Wendy was highlighted beautifully in the Disney version of Peter Pan.

2) The Crows from Dumbo – These feather bigots prove that racism is never funny.

3) Pumba and Timone – Simba’s flatulent side kicks. I have two words for you: Cheap laughs. Who decided to give them a spin-off?

4) Princess Aurora – Introducing small children to the lighter side of ‘stranger danger’ since 1959. Well, ok, it turns out that Prince Phillip is a family friend and they’ve been engaged all along, but she didn’t know that did she?

5) Donald Duck – The original exhibitionist – I have never seen this dude wearing pants, yet he feels the need to wear half a sailor costume. A Little too kinky for kids if you ask me.

Beth Cook, Film Editor

I Hate: Terminator Salvation

 

 The original Terminator is a popular sci-fi action thriller and its sequel, T2-Judgement Day, showed that sequels don’t have to be worse than the original film, and that action movies can actually have a decent plot in addition to all the explosions and guns.
  The latest addition to the franchise is Terminator Salvation where, in the year 2018 John Connor, played very one-dimensionally by Christian Bale, and the human resistance are trying to destroy the machines and Skynet; the controlling computer. We are also introduced to Marcus Wright, a death row inmate who had donated his body to Cyberdyne Systems before the war with the machines and now wakes up in the post-apocalyptic world of the future. Wright teams up with a young Kyle Reese and together they go about tearing the shit out of the evil, mechanised forces of Skynet.
  It’s right about here that any semblance of a plot just disappears, leaving the the rest of the film consisting of the following: destroying robots, move to the next scene, destroying more robots; and repeat. It seems that director McG thinks that plot holes can just be pasted over with liberal use of CGI and explosives. They can’t. Bale, supposedly the lead, is totally outperformed by Sam Worthington’s Marcus, so much so that the mis-cast Bale is reduced to banality. To his credit Worthington does his best, but is let down by an appalling screenplay, an invisible plot line and performances by his co-stars that are worse than that of the CGI Arnie that appears briefly towards the end.
  The film is lacking in all that made the first two Terminators great; originality, heart-pounding action, charm and that minor detail; a plot. Please, let’s send Arnie back in time to prevent this film ever being made.

John Milward

Regional Premier: Insidious – 12th April 2011

Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) are a happily married couple with three young children who have just moved into an idyllic new suburban home. But when tragedy strikes their young son, Josh and Renai begin to experience things in the house that are void of explanation. Before long, their lives are turned upside down by demonic forces, hell-bent on terrorising their very existence. Forced to seek help and protect their family, they learn the terrifying truth; it’s not the house that’s haunted.

James Wan and Leigh Whannell (the co-creators of SAW) join forces with the producers of Paranormal Activity to take you on a mind-bending and chilling journey into the world of the unknown.

The regional premier is on Tuesday 12th April at 7pm in Manchester Odeon Filmworks (in the Printworks in town), and will be followed by a Q&A with Director James Wan, and Writer/Actor Leigh Whannell, the dark minds behind the phenomenally successful SAW franchise.

Visit the film’s Facebook site for more info: www.facebook.com/insidiousUK

Book tickets for the event online here: https://www.odeon.co.uk/fanatic/booking-interactive/s11/p38371000023PKPOCBF/

(INSIDIOUS is in cinemas Nationwide April 29)