2024 | rated R | starring Naomi Grace, David Druid, Amy Hargreaves, William Russ | directed by Eric Bloomquist | 1 hr 46 mins | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest # 9
Finished in 2023, hitting the festivals in 2024 and released wide in 2025, Founders Day was held off and dropped when it could have had the most impact: a highly contentious political climate as well as a horror climate that was coming off the high of Terrifier 3‘s monster success. This was going to be the next disturbing horror film with gnarly practical kills and a slice of much-needed political satire. The film, directed by Eric Bloomquist and written by Eric and his brother Carson, fails to capitalize on that in the creativity department. It’s just not that good. It’s as violent as your average low budget slasher flick and doesn’t have anything to say about contemporary politics. And yet, all things considered, for a B- movie, I still had a pretty good time with it.
The mayoral election in the small town of Fairwood is heating up and this Constitution Day a masked killer starts stalking the residents of the town and the children of Mayor Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves) and challenger Faulkner (Jayce Bartok). When Allison (Naomi Grace)’s girlfriend is the first to be killed she sets off on a hunt to find the masked maniac, who dons a powdered wig, judge’s robe and wields a gavel with a retractable blade.
Not only is Founders Day not particularly gruesome, the whole thing leans far more on the side of camp than the side of actually wringing out chills from its audience. That’s fine. I was actually kind of into it. After a plethora of low-budget direct-to-video slashers heavy on a theme, that were creatively bankrupt and poorly executed, I found this one’s in-on-the-joke tone kind of refreshing. It’s better than It’s a Wonderful Knife. It’s better than the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer. It may even be more fun than the similarly 90s Scream-styled Clown in a Cornfield. It’s even better – in parts, calm down – than that movie that kicked off the recent trend of themed slashers, Thanksgiving. Founders Day follows the slasher pattern to a T, right up to the whodunnit killer reveal. But it has something a lot of these cheapo movies don’t, a personality. What I appreciated most about it was the appropriately campy performances from the leads, particularly Amy Hargreaves (Blue Ruin) who goes all out as the most interesting character, a mayor struggling to keep the campaign afloat while dealing with a serial killer whose murders drive her to madness.
While a series of non-descript teenagers start being butchered the real issue is how this will affect the campaign. The movie decides this particularly potato is too hot to hold into, so it downplays all the political elements into something unrecognizably cartoonish. Gladwell is running on “consistency” and Faulkner on “change” and that’s about as deep as it gets. This movie wasn’t ready for the violence of real-world politics to far outstrip that of any slasher movie.
There are some solid musical needle drops in the movie. There are also some confusing directions the movie takes when unfolding the plot. There is a pivotal scene at about the halfway mark where our hero just walks in on the killer, unmasked, in the middle of the crime. Instead of acting like this is a huge reveal, everybody just pretends it never happened and the killer is still out there, as if everyone in town knows there is a second killer without that information set up. Then we have Allison’s dutiful father (Andrew Stewart-Jones) killing the killer in obvious act of self-defense with a big shard of wood that a) we don’t really see because this movie has a small gore budget and b) is then investigated for murder and not that he was obviously being attacked by a guy in the same get-up and with the same uniquely customized weapon of a serial killer who has been slaughtering people all over town. I’m not a plot-hole nitpicker but I need the story to connect from minute to minute and either I missed several key pieces of information, or this big section of the movie doesn’t make sense.
Also in the plus column, the killer reveal is genuinely surprising. Maybe in order to appreciate the quaint personality charms of Bloomquist’s low-stakes slasher movie you have to have previously suffered through the botched reveals and dull kills of several other of these themed slasher movies. Had a not suffered through It’s a Wonderful Knife or this year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I probably wouldn’t have found this movie refreshing. This movie doesn’t want to rot my brain or lecture men to go to therapy. As this kind of budget-horror movie does, I was entertained while it lasted. I said I liked it, I didn’t say it was good.