Three Films Make A Post: Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch (2024): I still find Durch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert movies some of the most likeable projects in American (the Japanese side operates on a whole different level) POV horror low budget cinema. But with film number three, I – not a viewer typically needy for explanations – do find myself growing rather impatient with the film’s unwillingness to even show or say so much you’d need an explanation for it. In film number three, there’s great set-up work in the first act, much flabby nothing in the middle and a climax that has two or three shots but delivers so little it’s difficult to truly think of it as a climax, and not just a stopping point for the inevitable fourth movie, in which again little of import will happen (not happen – you know what I mean).

Beautiful Noise (2014): Eric Green’s music documentary is billed as an “in-depth exploration” of the roots of the genre the film goes out of its way not to call shoegaze, but in truth, it is a painfully  superficial and surface-level exploration of it. Instead of focussing on a handful of bands as a core for style and sound, this tries to squeeze a dozen or more of them into ninety minutes, chasing through soundbites and interview bits and pieces that could be revelatory in the proper context without ever arriving at anything like an argument or a point. There were bands, they were making music, their sound was sort of revolutionary and very influential, and that’s all we truly are allowed to learn through this approach.

Then there’s a terrible reliance on interviews with “famous fans”: Billy Corgan is rambling, on drugs, wearing the worst hat, and has no clue (as expected), Wayne Coyne appears comparatively sober (gasp!) and has little insight to add, and only The Cure’s Robert Smith appears to provide any musical insight.

Mayhem! aka Farang (2023): Despite the excitable English market title, this (mostly) Thailand set French action movie by Xavier Gens with the excellent Nassim Lyes as a man with a past finding his new-found family peace disturbed by old grudges is a rather slow affair for the first hour or so of its runtime. What’s there of action early on seems rather perfunctory, and the too-slow build-up of all the expected clichés of this sort of affair make the first two thirds a bit of a slog to get through, though certainly a professionally shot one.

Once the action comes, it certainly is gritty, bloody, and competently staged, yet I found myself watching it from a certain remove, too much of it having been spent on building up the expected early on, and a just as expected “plot twist” later.

I also have to say that I’m a bit tired of action movies killing off the female lead to motivate their male heroes to violence. At least when it’s done in as mechanical a fashion as it is done here.

In short: Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva (2023)

Following the disappearance and probable death of hiking blogger Gary Hinge in the first film, student Minerva Sound (Solveig Helene) dies under mysterious circumstances in a trailer in the Nevada High desert, which may be connected to the disappearance of yet another woman (Brooke Bradshaw), and a bag full of creepy, ambiguous videotapes Minerva found in the trailer.

Like its predecessor, Dutch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva is presented as a documentary about some mysterious occurrences. It is, however, a much superior film to my eyes (the Internet mostly disagrees there). For one, the ratio between talking heads segments and found footage action is much more sensible here, so the fake documentary bits provide framing and exposition but don’t take over the whole of the film, leaving space for the film to experiment with diverse modes of POV horror in its found footage segments, from handy footage, to old serial killer camcorder fun, to the good old “people panicking in the dark while holding an infrared camera”.

This does give the whole affair a lot more energy than the first film had and provides an opportunity to build up to more complex questions the planned next sequel may or may not answer. At the very least, there’s a sense of focus and direction here I didn’t get from the first movie, and enough basic storytelling skill to make this interesting and watchable throughout.

Some of the found footage segments are genuinely creepy – I’m particularly fond of the camcorder stuff and its suggestion of a greater weirdness, but there’s also some clever and effective use of found audio in the parts of the film about Minerva’s death, as well as in another moment later on, and a general sense of a pleasantly macabre imagination at work that often makes nice use of the feeling of isolation the locations provide. The final found footage bit goes on a bit too long for my taste for too little payoff, but the rest of the film is absolutely good enough to make up for a minor pacing problem like that.

In short: Horror in the High Desert (2021)

Warning: there will be spoilers, because the film is so slight, there’d be nothing to talk about otherwise

High Desert hiker - and as it will turn out vlogger - Gary Hinge (Eric Mencis) disappears on one of his excursions. The film purports to be a documentary about the event, so eighty percent or so of it consist of duelling talking heads interviews with Gary’s handful of friends and family, and a very slow beat for beat walkthrough of a rather uneventful investigations.

Eventually, it will turn out that Gary’s disappearance has something to do with a creepy cabin deep in the High Desert, and the backwoods mutant person (or is it?) living there. Since the final piece of film we get to see has been found in a camera held in Gary’s cut off hand, things have apparently ended badly for him.

Until we get to all that excitement and the somewhat effective found footage bit surrounding it, Dutch Marich’s lockdown-produced movie is a bit of a slog, unfortunately. I do like the fake documentary format for POV horror, because it makes exposition flow more naturally and can help filmmakers cut out unnecessary lengths, but in this case, too much of what the talking heads blabber about is of no actual pertinence to anything that’s going on. It also often doesn’t feel terribly well thought through in terms of logic or dramatic impact. There is, for example, no good reason to make it a surprise to most of the characters that Gary was blogging about his wilderness exploits apart from dragging the minor mystery of what’s going on out. There’s also too little of Gary’s actual footage in comparison to the talking heads, and very little even tiny creepiness happens for the first fifty minutes of the film or so. Some of this can probably explained by the way this had to be produced as a low budget movie during the pandemic, but understanding this doesn’t make the movie more entertaining to watch.

It’s a bit of a shame as well, for the last fifteen minutes or so of Horror in the High Desert are perfectly decent POV horror.