Oh dear, it’s always a little heartbreaking to watch a film trundle out its aspirations with confetti and sashes, only to trip over its own parade float and land face-first in the mud. Founders Day wants so much to be a cheeky contribution to the crowded boudoir of holiday slashers, a genre already thick with gore-soaked in-jokes and severed limbs of irony, but the result is the sort of limp, confounding spectacle which leaves you dazed at the exit, wondering whether you’ve seen a movie at all or simply sat through a particularly aggressive PTA meeting with unfortunate casualties.
Director Erik Bloomquist gestures toward satire, masquerading his killer in a powdered wig and crimson mask, stalking an archetypal New England town whose deep-dish political machinations supposedly mirror our own social rot. But there’s nothing remotely subversive in these shadows; the muck Bloomquist stirs up is recycled to the point of total starch, and everything from the “Who’s the Judge?” mystery to the squishy practical effects feels snipped from an afterschool special’s Halloween episode (only with added decapitations).
The characters drift onscreen like the runners-up at the Miss Regional Pageant, a lineup of blandly sketched campaigners, buttoned-up officials, and the required gaggle of wide-eyed teens. Naomi Grace and William Russ occasionally locate an emotional pulse amid the community-theatre chaos, but elsewhere the cast is directed to shrilly over-enunciate or moon about, as though expecting a tornado siren to cue the next bungle or reveal. The film’s protagonist seems to change hats, quite literally, with every fourth scene, robbing the viewer of even the simple pleasure of rooting for one likeable underdog. Instead, we get the cast shuffled like a deck of waterlogged cards, laboriously, pointlessly.
As for suspense, Founders Day wields its bag of tricks with the panache of a blackjack dealer at a toddler’s birthday party. The parade of chest-thumping red herrings, misjudged jump scares, and umpteen plot digressions add neither fun nor tension; the kills are staged with occasional, admirable (if puerile) gusto, only to be immediately undercut by the comic absurdity of that judge’s wig, a costuming choice capable of vaporizing menace faster than Scooby-Doo ever managed. Every practical gag is telegraphed, every character’s sudden about-face feels less like narrative mischief than panicked indecision. For all the attempted social decoding, politics as carnage, trust as a vanishing virtue, the film can only muster clichés and clumsy emotional appeals, its most interesting insight left stamped-out on the cutting room floor.
Visual invention? There are flashes. The blood, by sheer volume, sometimes distracts (or lubricates) the proceedings; the killer’s mask for a brief, flickering instant hints at the wiry camp horror this could have been. But any sense of style is drowned in a syrup of awkward edits, muddy lighting, and a soundtrack that thuds and wails as if trying to revive a flatlining script. It’s the sort of distracted mayhem you find in a local haunted hayride, earnest in its chaos, but never truly frightening. Even the climactic twist, a last-minute kernel of convolution, can’t rescue the narrative from its own morass: it’s less a climax than a mercy.
Really, Founders Day is the sort of film that gives up on itself as you're still watching: all concepts and no confidence, half-committed gags swollen to nonsense, and pacing measured by the moribund battery life of your phone as you check it, minute by minute, hoping for something, anything, to jolt awake. For those who measure their Halloweens by body counts and latex, you could do worse, but only in the sense that one candy bar is marginally less stale than its neighbor. For the rest of us, who expect when a genre is spoofed, it’s sent up with a rocket, not a damp squib, this one’s really just a civic embarrassment few will recall, let alone celebrate.
If anyone ever celebrates Founders Day, I hope it’s on a day when no one shows up. This is a holiday slasher for the municipal landfill, a film best buried, not exhumed.
