Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva

Horror in the High Desert was a fairly effective horror mockumentary about the disappearance of a hiker that was let down by its ending; A (spoilers!) mutant hillbilly slasher was a poor payoff to all the buildup the rest of the film diligently put together.

 It didn't seem to cry out for a sequel, but Dutch Marich returns to the well with a slightly more ambitious attempt. As explained by Marich's fictional stand-in, Daniel Prince, in a voiceover introduction: ever since the first movie came out, people started calling in with information about other, similar disappearances. When the crew looked into it, they realized "all of this is part of a bigger mystery than (they) could have ever imagined".

 The film primarily delves into the death of Minerva Sound (Solveig Helene), who was found dead in her trailer in the outskirts of a tiny Nevada town, as told by a journalist (Suziey Block, returning from the first movie), Minerva's best friend Cathy (Sami Sallaway), and a couple other witnesses. As with the first movie, the script does a good job of making the case interesting, with a lot of cool and very creepy touches - the main one here being the discovery of a bag in her trailer containing some bizarre-looking paintings, and a VHS tape belonging to a pretty disturbed individual. The contents hint at mass murder and, yeah, a bigger mystery, one that is only implied and never gone into; It's really well handled.

 That's until the film unceremoniously drops Minerva's story about two-thirds in to abruptly focus on a new victim - Ameliana Brasher (Brooke Bradshaw); It never really recovers from that.
 Ameliana's story has got some excellent moments - her death is truly upsetting - and it leads to another long stretch of first person footage, this time belonging to one of the people sent to look for her.
 The problem is not whether Ameliana's story is interesting or scary or not, it's that it very much feels like a side-story that never really adds anything to either Minerva's tale or the developing mystery.

 This lack of focus, and the poor job it does tying up Minerva's story, hurts the movie badly. Other than that it's another pretty good no-budget, extremely slow burn slice of spooky Americana. It's got a great management of tension, excellent sound design, a good approximation of an actual documentary, and an engaging narrative. A second sequel is already in post-production, promising to return to the original case; hopefully it will find a better way to tell its story than this one.

Horror in the High Desert

 Real, actual documentaries are so desperate to drum up tension and drama that they could actually deploy all sort of cheesy, manipulative devices and dirty tricks ("No one could ever imagine the horrible consequences this would bring...", sensationalist reconstructions), 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 about it again. Still, it kind of works because this is the direction documentaries have evolved into, unfortunately. But when the script hits a few snags later on, it's more than a little aggravating.

 The ending involves an overlong sequence of found footage of someone stumbling in some dark brush, the impact of which will depend on whether you're still invested in the story by that point. It drags quiet a bit and, as mentioned, the payoff is a letdown, but it's effectively creepy at least some of the time; And it at least 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 payoffs.
 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 at the moment, 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.