Review: Founders Day

After Eli Roth successfully captured the good of the 80s and early 90s slasher films with Thanksgiving in 2023, in the same year, we get a prime example that the beloved era also had a lot of garbage. Founders Day wants to be both an homage to the greats and a political satire, but it fails miserably on both counts. The makers are familiar with the genre, and this is all just painfully bad. 99.999% of the citizens are idiots, and the sheriff, or whatever her title was, comes across like a mix of Kojack and Yogi Bear. 

A small town of cartoon characters is on the brink of a heated election from the most over-the-top representation of political figures you’ll see outside of Fox News. Young Allison Chambers appears to bid adieu to her girlfriend on a bridge when a masked individual shows up and kills her. Small-town bridges at night equal death. That’s the rule. Anyway, after that, these entirely believably real people must contend with madness as more and more citizens are murdered. Who is the killer or the killer? Why is the killer? Where is the killer? Where do these killers get these custom masks in bulk?

It’s always a difficult balancing act to film a slasher film full of sympathetic people and those who are fodder for the killer. However, as I stated above, so many are over-the-top, stereotypical assholes, idiots, and psychopaths from the get-go that nothing at all that’s going on seems to be realistic in the slightest. 

Yes, the mask is pretty cool. No, the kills are all pretty much PG-13 and generic.

This film wants to be Scream so badly, which I’ll confess is a little spoiler if you cannot figure out what’s happening early. Red herrings are important to a slasher, though few get it completely right, but here it’s really if you think they’re involved, they are. At least in Scream, the killers have a better motive; here, they’re just crazy because that’s convenient for the character(s) evil monologue at the end. 

This is no Scream. It’s not even Scream 4, which was the worst part of that series. 

I love that the slasher genre is coming back, but we need to make a little more effort than this for it to stay around for a while.