Founders Day (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – A small town is shaken by a series of ominous killings in the days leading up to a heated mayoral election.

My Take – The success of the Scream franchise indeed drew many inspirations, but while last year’s Eli Roth directorial ‘Thanksgiving’ doubled down on its best elements to deliver a fun experience, this latest from director Erik Bloomquist (She Came from the Woods) in its aim to desperately act as a clever satire of small-town politics laced with a classic slasher flick, ends up being a bloody mess.

The script by writer/director Erik Bloomquist and his co-writer/editor sibling Carson Bloomquist sets up some potentially intriguing ideas and adds enough formulaic elements, especially teens meeting gory deaths, to keep viewers in their seats. Sadly though, it doesn’t all come together particularly well.

Mainly as the film can’t quite decide if it wants to be an over-the-top gore-fest, a sly satirical take-down, or just a straightforward retread of slasher classics, and by trying to straddle those different tones, it ends up feeling muddled and unsatisfying on all fronts.

Sure, it shows flashes of creativity, but this particular melding of horror and political themes needed much sharper execution to truly work. The script particularly stumbles in its climactic revelations, with an even worse epilogue bound to send patrons out rolling their eyes in disapproving disbelief.

Add to that the uneven performances of a cast that is rushing through barely functional dialogue, the film eventually ends up feeling like what it ultimately is, a promising slasher that, like too many of its long-forgotten predecessors, fails to live up to its promise.

Set in the small-town of Fairwood, which is fast approaching its 300th anniversary and the election of its next mayor. The race between the incumbent Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves) and brash challenger Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok) has become a contentious one, as it has divided the town into two groups of supporters. But the story mainly follows Allison Chambers (Naomi Grace), who is on the verge of leaving for higher education, despite pleases from her girlfriend Melissa Faulkner (Olivia Nikkanen) to stay in town a little longer, as they take a stroll on a desolate, nighttime bridge.

Only to be confronted by a masked figure, wearing a ghoulish red mask, a white founding fathers wig, and a long black judge’s robe, who beats Melissa, with his wooden gavel with a protracting blade in the handle, and throws her off from the bridge as Melissa helplessly watches. And this is just the start of a killing spree, which is quickly exploited by the candidates for political gain, even after members of their own families are targeted. The casualty list eventually encompasses adults as well as adolescents.

Among other significant figures under suspicion and/or at risk are Harold’s son Adam (Devin Druid), who just had a painful breakup with Blair’s daughter Lilly (Emilia McCarthy), her bad-boy new squeeze Rob (Tyler James White), beloved veteran teacher Mr. Jackson (William Russ), the school’s least-beloved bratty delinquents (Kate Edmonds, Dylan Slade), the mayor’s campaign manager (Erik Bloomquist), Allison’s widowed dad (Andrew Stuart-Jones), the police chief (Catherine Curtin) and her deputy (Adam Weppler).

What follows is an uneven experience full of the genre’s greatest cliché hits that clearly owes a debt to belated filmmaker Wes Craven, the teen slasher film storytelling king. The central group of potential victims are the typical assortment of hormone-fueled teens you’d expect in a slasher: the insecure girl who dies first, the cypher-like best friend, the hot-headed jock type, the class overachiever, and the bickering former couples caught up in new relationships.

Inevitably some are just fodder for the killer to beat or butcher. Others are there to fill our pool of suspects. No one has much depth, but they all help convey the feeling of a small town community.

On the horror front, the killer makes for an undeniably creepy visual with the wig and gavel weapon. A few of the death scenes also manage to be shockingly brutal in their execution. However, the film lacks any real sense of sustained dread or creative kills that elevate it above standard slasher fare. Along the way we get some utterly disposable teen drama that never registers and feels more like filler than anything else.

It’s also borderline unrealistic why these politicians running on practically nothing would not only split the town roughly in half but also engender so much enmity between their supporters that they would spend their late-night hours screaming at each other across what passes as a main street.

Here, Gladwell and Faulkner don’t represent two sides of the political spectrum as much as two sides of the same political system, promising change with newer, fresher candidates, while always delivering the same level of me-first, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately corrupt politics. With both its political commentary and slasher elements ultimately lacking much depth or originality, the film finds itself trapped in the middle – not quite provocative enough with its satire, but also failing to fully deliver the gory goods expected of the genre.

Performances wise, Naomi Grace as Allison tries to buck conventions as a Black lesbian character, but she’s given so little to work with that she falls flat. Devin Druid and Olivia Nikkanen shine the most among the young cast, while Emilia McCarthy, Tyler James White, Kate Edmonds and Dylan Slade slip between good and bad.

On the other hand, William Russ, Amy Hargreaves, Catherine Curtin, Jayce Bartok, Andrew Stewart-Jones and Adam Weppler act out caricatures that are not funny nor incisive enough to make it work. On the whole, ‘Founders Day’ is an underwhelming genre effort that neither works as an effective horror slasher or an engaging political satire.