Horror in High Desert(2021) & Horror in High Desert 2: Minerva(2023)(Review)

I’ve been on a found footage kick lately. And with that territory comes an entire slew of films that vary dramatically with their quality. For every one good found footage film you find, there’s probably 4 bad ones to follow – and that’s not even touching the mid-tier ones. So, when a title gets a decent buzz in this subgenre, I’m always happy to dive in and see what’s in store for me. So today I bring you a double feature – ‘Horror in the High Desert’ and it’s sequel ‘Minerva’.

‘Horror in the High Desert’ tells the story of outdoors-enthusiast Gary Hinge who has a semi-popular YouTube channel. He has mysteriously gone missing one day after posting an ominous video, and what we are presented with is a mockumentary that follows reporters and friends as they try to make sense of the last few days where Gary was seen and can be accounted for. It spirals into a journey of the strange and unusual, sun-scorched desert scapes, and creepy POV videos from Gary himself that are found in absurd places long after his disappearance.

‘Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva’ is, for all intents and purposes, the same setup but regards a completely different case. Minerva Sound is found dead in her rented trailer home in the middle of the Nevada Desert. We are greeted with a 911-phone call of an officer entering the home and finding her body, and again we are shown interviews as they dive into the evidence of what happened in this case. There is also a second case near the end of the film regarding another woman disappearing off a stretch of highway not too far from the home only a short time afterwards, and we question if there is a connection.

On their own, these films are very solid. The first one is slower than the sequel and it plays out like a literal crime documentary where 2 or 3 people at a time give a story or examine evidence and come to the same conclusion. It can be rather dry and pedantic for most of it, but the found footage we do get from Gary himself is disturbing and the final 20 minutes of this movie more than makes up for the rest of it. For the sequel, however, the filmmaker did his homework. This one is much more “action-packed” with even longer segments of found footage which are very disturbing. The mystery is convincing, the suspense actually makes you panic, and once again the final 20 minutes are a banger.

As a whole – this series really works. It’s minimalism found footage horror that only makes one real promise to its audience – and it delivers. The first one suffers by being a bit too methodical for the entertainment value we are searching for as an audience, but the second one delivers by giving us more to hold our breath through for longer durations of time. The very final footage we see in ‘Minerva’ was so unrelenting, I actually rewound it 2 or 3 times to really soak in what was happening.

I’ve had fun with this series so far. Perhaps it had been hyped up a bit higher by those I’ve heard before, but it certainly was not a disappointment. Plus, the third entry in this series, “Horror In the High Desert 3: Firewatch” was just released not even a month ago. I’m very excited to check it out and report back on it.

2.5/5 & 3.5/5 – Respectively
You can stream both of these films for free on Tubi.

‘Til Next Time,
Mike Cleopatra