The Andy Baker Tape – 2021, US, 70m. Director: Bret Lada.
Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva – 2023, US, 74m. Director: Dutch Marich.
Tahoe Joe – 2022, US, 88m. Director: Dillon Brown, Michael Rock.
THE ANDY BAKER TAPE (2021) Suave video blogger Jeff Blake (Bret Lada) sets out on a road trip with Andy (Dustin Fontaine), his wrong-side-of-the-tracks half-brother. Thinking it would make a great bonding experience—while at the same time creating content for his YouTube channel—Jeff records their adventure while sampling different foods around the Jersey Shore. Andy’s personality clashes with Jeff’s strict on-camera tactics, creating an air of tension between the two brothers. Their relationship crescendos when Andy decides to make his own home movies and reveals to Jeff what really happened to their deceased father. A well-produced, nicely acted, but ultimately predictable and disappointing found footage chiller that doesn’t go far enough. C (Currently streaming on Tubi.)
HORROR IN THE HIGH DESERT 2: MINERVA (2023) A series of bizarre disappearances and deaths within a small Nevada town is seemingly connected to the unsolved vanishing of explorer Gary Hinge a year earlier, documented in the first Horror in the High Desert (2021). Focusing their attention on circumstances surrounding the demise of geology student Minerva Sound (Solveig Helene), a film crew looks into the young woman’s last days, while staying in a remote trailer in the middle of some desert wilderness known as Cypress. Much like the first film, Horror in the High Desert 2 is structured as a faux-documentary and interweaves interviews with footage shot by neighbors, search-and-rescue teams, dash cams, and content from Minerva’s phone. There’s a videocassette found within the wall paneling of Minerva’s trailer that features some impressively unnerving footage reminiscent of the movie reels found by Ethan Hawke in Sinister. Details—such as that video tape and the climactic body cam footage of a volunteer fireman searching for a missing mother in a ramshackle house—give the movie an overwhelmingly creepy aesthetic lacking in many other found footage titles. Horror in the High Desert 2 can’t distinguish itself enough to truly separate it from the bulk of similar-themed POV vehicles, but an ending leaving the door open for Horror in the High Desert 3: Oscar should tickle fans. B– (Currently streaming on Tubi.)
TAHOE JOE (2022) A former Green Beret (Michael Rock) is hired to search the last known whereabouts of a missing person in the wilderness of Lake Tahoe. When it becomes known that the missing individual was searching for a Bigfoot-like figure known as Tahoe Joe, Rock is joined by skeptical filmmaker Dillon Brown to capture possible evidence of the mythical creature. The set-up of Tahoe Joe sounds like the majority of POV horror titles released in the wake of The Blair Witch Project, although many found footage fans will link this to 2013’s Willow Creek, which successfully immersed the viewer in its claustrophobic, woodsy environment. Tahoe Joe makes the mistake of spending too much time out of the woods and focusing on details that should really only have taken a few minutes of plot exposition. The movie saves face by delivering likable characters in a suspenseful final fifteen minutes. C+ (Currently streaming on Tubi.)