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.