Horror in the High Desert

 Real, actual documentaries are so desperate to drum up tension and drama that you can actually use all sort of cheesy, manipulative devices and dirty tricks ("No one could ever imagine the horrible consequences this would bring..."), and it would still feel like something you could watch on the Discovery Channel.

 This is both a blessing and a curse for Horror in the High Desert, a simple but clever horror mockumentary that tracks the disappearance of one Gary Hinge in the Nevada wilderness.
 The talking heads in this case are Gary's sister Beverly (Tonya Williams Ogden), a journalist (Suziey Block) and a couple more, who slowly recount the investigation into Gary's disappearance. It nails the format, which makes the ultimately underwhelming mystery at the movie's center more compelling than it would otherwise be.

 Gary was an outdoorsman who would disappear into the unpopulated Nevada outback for days at a time - until he actually, well, disappeared. The film does a good job of making the people around him likeable, and it piles on a modest amount of weird touches to make the case progressively creepier.
 It also piles on the dirty tricks: narrators spend a lot of time building up a forthcoming revelation will be,  only for the narrative to double back and follow the same thread from another person's point of view. It tells, tells, tells, shows, then tells you about what it's just shown you. And then it switches to another character who tells you again. It kind of works because this is the direction documentaries have evolved in, unfortunately. But when the script hits a few snags later on, it's more than a little aggravating.

 The ending involves a long sequence of found footage, the impact of which will depend on whether you're still invested in the story by that point. It's overlong and, as mentioned, the payoff is a letdown, but it's effectively creepy at least some of the time; And it does a good job justifying why the person behind the camera keeps filming everything.

 It's pretty well crafted; pulling it off so that it passes the smell test of being indistinguishable from an actual documentary can't be that easy, so good job director Dutch Marich and his crew. His script does write itself into a few corners in the process of filling out eighty minutes, but overall it progresses nicely and builds towards its payoff.
 The mockumentary format is friendly to low budgets -much more so than found footage, I'd wager, because here you can just cut to the actors talking over a still or some stock footage- but it's also very rigid, and keeps its material at arm's length. The framework is anathema to a lot of what makes the genre work; There's a reason there are tons of found footage horror films, but so few of them take the next step and go on to become documentaries that use that footage - I can only think of Lake Mungo, and... well, that's not a comparison this movie can take.
 Still, this one holds together and maintains interest all the way to the end. It's alright, I enjoyed it. We'll see how the sequel moves things forward.