Dir - Dutch Marich
Overall: MEH
Overall: MEH
Indie filmmaker Dutch Marich pulls off an unsatisfying bait-and-switch with Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva, a follow-up to his 2021 film Horror in the High Desert that utilizes the same mockumentary framework while detouring with a different story that only mentions the events from the first film in passing, once again promising to get back to them later. So yes, this one ends on another cliffhanger to try and garnish interest in further developments, yet by the looks of things, Marich may lose viewers instead of continuing to hook them along the way. As opposed to its predecessor, there is no long-winded build up here as we get right to the unsettling found footage in a fresh new missing case; the woman of the title who was a geology student shacked up at a creepy, isolated trailer with a vaguely sinister past. Part of the problem is that while we are given a lot of stuff to look at that spans several years and various characters, it is frustratingly undecipherable. Marich is going for a teasing approach to keep us invested as to what is luring in such murky, dark, and poorly photographed shots, but the mystery is deepened without any interesting revelations. We also have a haphazard side-plot that takes up the entire third act and some silly paintings of creepy figures in the woods, making this a bloated and meandering side-step that tries our patience in place of delivering genuine chills.
Dir - John Adams/Zelda Adams/Toby Poser
Overall: MEH
The latest from the Adams family who write, produce, direct, shoot, and star in their own independent horror films, Where the Devil Roams is another quirky slice of violent, occult-fueled Americana that recalls their 2018 movie The Hatred. Set during the Great Depression where people are reeling from the devastation of World War I, it has the Adamses portraying a family of traveling carnie folk who occasionally murder people along their route. Aesthetically, the digital film quality is too clean and low-end to properly convey the time period, but the team's penchant for grimy, goth rock surreal flashes, their own metal band H6llB6nd6r providing a not-at-all-time-accurate soundtrack, and characters routinely rhyming, singing, doing interpretative theater, and poetically pontificating about the Devil and the like all rides the line of being cringy, yet also deliberately macabre and kitschy. As has steadily been the case, the cinematic output of Toby Poser and John and Zelda Adams is more fun than good, but if this is any indication, it is also getting more grand and bizarre which in their case is not a bad thing.
Dir - John Rosman
Overall: MEH
A promising if imperfect debut from writer/director John Rosman, New Life has a bare-bones premise that equally focuses on two women who are undergoing traumatic experiences, but it utilizes cheap horror tactics that undermine a solid story about the unavoidable encroachment of life's cruel hand. Sonya Walger and Haley Erin's characters would otherwise have no reason to cross each other's paths, but when the later unknowingly becomes an asymptomatic host to an aggressive virus that reduces anyone who comes in contact with it to a blood-thirsty puss zombie, Walger's fixer, (who has recently been diagnosed with her own comparatively more slow-moving disease), must hunt the poor, confused, and terrified lady down. It makes for a heart-wrenching watch and both actors are ideally cast as women who are going through the motions to survive, only for their ailments to get the better of them come hell or high water. The budget is modest and besides some nasty blood work, it is void of special effects, all of which makes it agreeably intimate. Sadly, we also have stupid jump scares and when a handful of poor saps become fully infected, they lurch at the camera and omit the same stock, loud screechy monster noise that is in virtually every single contemporary horror movie. Take that lazy nonsense out of the equation and play everything without a genre-pandering agenda and you have a duel, post-pandemic character study that is well-done and potent.
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