By PETER RUGG
Movies in the upcoming Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors in New Jersey are imaginative if not tasteful — which is the whole point. Among the three days of films screening at the horror fan convention, there’s Machine Girl, about a Japanese high school student with a machine gun for an arm who fights gangsters and ninjas, and Splatter Disco, which is exactly what it sounds like. This is a convention for hardcore monster fans who want to see people exploding in the most artful ways possible. So it’s nice to see a pair of locals leading the pack.
A short-film showcase called Horrors From Kansas kicks off the weekend.
The three films are all independent shorts shot by Lawrence-based SenoReality Pictures. The company was founded Patrick Rea and Ryan Jones, who started making scary movies together when they met as students at KU.
Their showcase features a satirical short called Torture Porn, about a guy with a blowtorch; Now That You’re Dead, a story about double-homicide and revenge from beyond the grave; and The Fluff, a fake trailer about a murderous, sexually deviant ball of cotton.
“We actually just finished it all last night,” Rea, 28, said on Tuesday. “We had a few tweaks, and we had to get the score inserted. Fangoria needed it by Wednesday, so I just overnighted it.”
Rea and Ryan got involved with Fangoria when they submitted their short horror movies for a film contest called Blood Drive. “It was right after we graduated from college, and they put the DVD out in 2004, and they’ve been really helpful and supportive of us ever since,” Rea says.
Since then, a collection of their short films called Heartland Horrors has become available on Netflix, and their full-length feature The Empty Acre was picked by Fangoria as a DVD of the Month.
Rea and Jones will stay in Lawrence this weekend because they already attended the Los Angeles version of the convention earlier this year. If you can’t get a ticket to New Jersey to support local independent cinema, at least make the trip to Liberty Hall in Lawrence at 7 p.m. on July 21, when they’ll be showing 90 minutes of their work.
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