FOUNDERS DAY - Mark Reviews Movies

Founders Day, Dark Sky Films

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | January 18, 2024

Small town politics get the slasher treatment in Founders Day, but don't expect this movie to have anything to say about that specific subject or the broader political climate of the day. It's too busy with half-hearted melodrama and a convoluted yet predictable mystery to take advantage of such easy targets.

The backdrop is some sleepy little town somewhere in the United States, where an upcoming mayoral election apparently has a couple dozen members of the population very fired up about their chosen candidate. It feels a little unfair to critique such a movie for its obvious budget limitations, especially when there are more significant issues at hand, but the genre-requisite opening sequence, which eventually has a masked killer emerging from the shadows to enact violence on an unsuspecting teen, includes dueling groups of protestors on the town's main thoroughfare.

It's such a small collection of people, emphasized by co-writer/director Erik Bloomquist's tendency to shoot them at wide angles, that it appears as unlikely as the scenario sounds. When the same assembly keeps showing up at various events, we're just reminded that the whole enterprise is as limited in its execution as it is in its vision of and ideas about politics.

That killer (or killers, as characters in the movie itself suggest as a likely situation—making it likely that a not-insignificant percentage of the population is made up of serial killers and their victims) is someone—or some people—dressed as a red-faced judge, adorned in black robes and wielding a gavel. Our sort-of main character Allison (Naomi Grace) is there to witness the first of several murders, when her girlfriend Melissa (Olivia Nikkanen), the daughter of mayoral candidate Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok), is assaulted out of nowhere on a bridge. The scene isn't convincing in terms of setting the tone or making the killer a threat, and while there's a counterargument that doing either of those things isn't the ultimate point of the scene, that just raises another significant problem of how Bloomquist fails to keep the mystery much of one.

Many more people are murdered by the masked individual or individuals in scenes that are wholly routine. Someone in the auditorium of the local movie theater is beaten, made to crawl across broken glass in an attempt to escape, and is cut across the throat. Another is stabbed in the head while hiding under the bleachers of the high school gym. Because of the lousy attempt at political satire, one victim of a double-kill is impaled by a campaign yard sign. If anything, the filmmakers are at least consistent in how unimaginative every element of the movie is.

That's particularly—and sadly—true of the movie's humor, which has the town's sweet-toothed police chief (played by Catherine Curtin) making jokes at crime scenes—even after watching a mother howl in agony at seeing her daughter's mutilated corpse—and is almost embarrassing in terms of its aims for political satire. We have Harold, the candidate who's running on a vague promise of "change," and current mayor Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves), who argues the town needs consistency.

That's about it in terms of both the setups and the punch lines of the screenplay (written by the director and his brother Carson Bloomquist), meaning it's much funnier how the school's social studies teacher (played by William Russ) is known and seen by everyone as an unquestionable authority of wisdom. He has the ability to stop heated arguments and bar fights with just a few words of non-committal thinking. Why doesn't he just run for mayor in what would be landslide of tens of votes? That question, by the way, becomes more pertinent to how little sense the plot makes than it should.

Most of the story is devoted to the characters, who don't exist for much but to be killed or get away, and some teenaged romance drama, which isn't worth discussing because the participants are just fodder for the killer(s). Many familiar things lead to narrative and thematic dead ends, in other words.

There's one real moment of potential inspiration to be found here, and that's the decision to unmask the murderous judge about halfway through the story. It ultimately doesn't mean much, of course, except to confirm multiple guesses, suspicions, or genre-based knowledge about the big revelation of the central mystery of Founders Day, which just leads to an even bigger one that beggars belief.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products