Founders Day review: Gruesome fun for slasher devotees

There are lots of ways to tell when you’re in good hands while watching a movie. It might be the casting, or the lighting, or the clever dialogue in the script. It might be the way the film plays with genre, or the way it catches you off guard with smart plotting. For horror fans, all of these things can be true, but it’s often just as important t

o feel the people who made the film you’re watching don’t just love the genre, but luxuriate in it. Founders Day, the new slasher flick from Erik and Carson Bloomquist, is one of those movies that makes you feel that.

If you’re a longtime devotee of the horror genre, and a particular fan of slasher films, you’ll find a small-scale whodunit packed with love for all the movies that came before it, and you’ll find that love is infectious. And if you’re not a slasher nerd, don’t worry, this entertaining, wicked little movie can still win you over, even if it might take you a little longer to find its particular groove.

The “Founders Day” of the title is a local celebration in the small town of Fairwood, where residents are also planning for a particularly heated mayoral election that pits the incumbent Mayor Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves, having a ball) against the upstart challenger Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok). Gladwell is running on a platform of “consistency,” while Faulkner is promising “change,” and their heated contest has the whole town on edge. So it probably doesn’t help when a maniac in a black robe and a gruesome, powdered-wig-topped Founders mask comes hunting for victims.

To make things even more tense, the killer seems to be targeting the kids close to each mayoral candidate. A couple of local teenagers are trying to get to the bottom of things: Allison (Naomi Grace), who lost her girlfriend in the killings, and Adam (Devin Druid), who lost his sister, are each doing their best to unmask the murderer for the good of their families and the whole town. But what they find when they dig deeper is something neither of them expects.

If you take a moment to piece the ingredients together here—robed and masked killer, sleepy town, murdered teenagers, whodunit—you might recognize them from several major slasher films, most notably Scream, and it’s here that Founders Day starts to get especially interesting.

The Bloomquist brothers (Erik directed, and both Erik and Carson wrote the script) clearly know their stuff, right down to their use of a cocky local cop (Catherine Curtin doing scene-stealing work) and the local bad boy (Tyler James White) who might be a killer or might just be a rebel for the sake of rebelling. The Bloomquist’s are experts in these ingredients, and when they bring them together, they’re both paying tribute to films that came before and setting themselves up to go their own way with certain familiar bits of slasher etiquette. It helps, of course, that all those familiar pieces are executed well, from the witty dialogue to the design of the killer’s mask to, of course, the kill scenes that make great use of jump scares and creeping slasher dread. Founders Day might not have the budget of some of its fellow slashers, but it has the heart, and the craft, to make all these things work.

To up the ante on the twisted little game that they’re playing, the Bloomquists throw in the political satire element at the core of the film. Part of the fun of a slasher movie is finding potential victims for the killers who maybe, sorta, kinda deserve it, and there’s no shortage of those in this movie, with its ideological echo chambers and chaotic town meetings and Us vs. Them divisiveness that seems to come from a place of pure, unbridled anger rather than any real sense of principle.

Heightened and somewhat cartoonish though they are, you’ve met these people either in person or on the news: The perpetually offended, the shamless opportunists, the bulldogs who will never let go of a single issue. They’re all here, but Founders Day never makes the mistake of letting them grind their gears to the point that it deafens the audience. There’s a sense of fun throughout, and that allows the Bloomquist brothers to get away with all manner of jabs at modern American political life.

Where this starts to fall short, if only a little, is that the film’s blend of high-concept slasher and political satire never quite blends into a single cohesive thing. There’s a certain detachment between the two that makes the film just a little bumpy when it’s shifting gears, and while it all comes together in a satisfying way by the end, those gear shifts are hard to miss. It’s hard to say whether the film would’ve worked as a longer version of this story or a shorter one, but either way, something’s just a little off … but only a little.

The rest of the time, Founders Day is a slasher movie blast, a clever, brutal little movie that’s capable of pleasing diehard horror fans and newcomers alike, provided you’re willing to meet the movie where it is. If you love slashers, you definitely shouldn’t miss this one.

Founders Day opens in theaters January 19