Celebrity News:

Elite Entertainment has released Heartland Horrors, a compilation of ten short films from the Kansas-based production companies, Senoreality Pictures and Gunn Park Entertainment. I don't have The Horror Channel, where I understand these films are shown as part of a series, so I wasn't sure what to expect when the DVD arrived. I was pleasantly surprised. Shot on video with zero money and local actors, these idie horror efforts have a lot of style and economy of storytelling, with a nicely warped sense of humor that gets the viewer over the obvious drawbacks of some of the tentative acting choices and the budgetary restrictions.

Ten short films are included here, with run-times from a little over three minutes to twelve and thirteen minutes each. And while many of the shorts have an obvious Twilight Zone-inspired feeling to their "twisted-back-on-itself" plot revelations, the brevity of the run-times, and the genuinely creepy air that some of the shorts manage, more than make up for any feelings of deja vu viewers may experience with these sorts of stories.

What struck me first with the Heartland Horrors collection, was the admirably ordinary settings and locations that worked quite well within the horror genre. The rather stark, eerily beautiful Kansas landscapes are used to good effect in A Mile Back Aways, a combination ghost story/Driver's Ed. instructional film (one of the earlier efforts in this collection), and Café at the Crossroads, a nicely tuned little post-apocalyptic jive set in a shabby diner. And the marvelously square neighborhoods featured in Smoke and The Last Laugh give one the sense that these outrageous little shockers aren't so incongruously set. All one has to do is read the papers to believe that these sick, twisted tales of sadism and torture in Heartland Horrors - filtered through a Lynchian Looney Tunes sensibility - may indeed be playing out in some of those plain, anonymous houses we pass every day.

And while some of the acting in Heartland Horrors is amateurish and limited, the directing prowess of Patrick Rea and Kendal Sinn more than make up for the thespian shortfalls. Frequently razor-sharp in shot selection and in the tight, tight editing schemes (Josh Robison), these shorts move, making their point and exiting before you have a chance to see the cracks. Woman's Intuition, one of the most successful shorts in this collection, manages more suspense, with its laser-like correctness in framing and editing, in ten minutes than I've seen in most recent big budget feature films out there this year. Not all of the shorts work; Bitter Sweets is an amateurish attempt at holiday mayhem that looks all too entirely "home made," while Out to Pasture, although technically proficient, is just too abbreviated even for a short form film, to really work. But those are minor quibbles in a collection of horror shorts that consistently maintain interest due to some snappy direction and an admirably sick, twisted sense of humor.