TAD23 REVIEW: Founders Day [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 106 minutes
Release Date: January 19th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Dark Sky Films
Director(s): Erik Bloomquist
Writer(s): Erik Bloomquist & Carson Bloomquist

These are especially difficult times.

Mayor Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves) is selling consistency with her re-election campaign. Her challenger, Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok), is promising change. Do either ever expand on what those buzz words mean? Do they need to when their small town knows them both by name? At a certain point all elections in this country have become popularity contests wherein policy and actual governing acumen are seen as liabilities instead of strengths. You can’t actually do anything anymore. Half the nation will turn on you if you do. So, all that’s left is screaming about what your opponent might do in your place.

This political masquerade sits at the back of director Erik Bloomquist and co-writer Carson Bloomquist’s latest collaboration Founders Day. The titular festival is upon this sleepy neighborhood with the ballot boxes waiting their turn a couple days later. But it is just a backdrop. The brothers aren’t necessarily supplying us with a political horror thriller as much as dressing their comic slasher up in government clothes. Their murderer wears a powdered wig and wields a retractable ice pick gavel as though he’s doling out justice, but is he? Is killing kids truly justice? Or is it merely a distraction for petty jealousies?

Don’t think too hard about these questions while watching, though. Not because the Bloomquists don’t consider them, but because they do. What’s fun about the film is that it proves to be all those things at once. And rather than be a cop-out as a result (which, I’ll admit to believing once the climatic reveals arrive with what appears to be zero rhyme or reason), this reality enhances the whole. For one, it allows them to kill anyone and everyone on-screen. No one is off-limits—except maybe Allison Chambers (Naomi Grace) as our lead. But it also affords ample space for shifting motives to pivot between targets for additional exploitation.

There’s a reason for everything. It might not be the master plan you’re imagining in the moment, but it is purposeful if only to provide red herrings for the real plot to unfold. All the drama from teen romance—Naomi dating Melissa (Olivia Nikkanen) after Melissa broke up with Rob (Tyler James White) who’s now dating Lily (Emilia McCarthy) after Lily broke up with Adam (Devin Druid)—to a Montague/Capulet struggle set-up by Melissa and Adam being Faulkners and Lily being a Gladwell exists to make you prejudge the grudges and bloodlust. Just because those notions aren’t the end all justification, however, doesn’t mean they aren’t also true.

Add some laugh-out-loud moments (Kate Edmonds’ Britt screaming that she “learned her lesson” during detention only after watching someone get brutally murdered in front of her or anything the always great Catherine Curtin does as Police Commissioner Peterson) and it’s easy to get caught up in the goofiness as well as the mystery thanks to more level-headed characterizations via Grace and William Russ’ Mr. Jackson—a respected teacher who taught every single person in the movie at one point in his life. It never takes itself seriously and yet it has some serious moments to consider if not use beyond how it serves a punch line or death.

When it comes to the so-called “greater good,” the ends can justify the means … in theory. Any drop of blood split proves too much in the real world and Charles Manson-like puppet masters pulling strings are just as culpable as those holding the weapons, but wouldn’t it be nice to look the other way sometimes in fiction? If floods and locusts are acceptable means for God to earn a clean slate, why can’t a homicidal maniac “drain the swamp” so someone who actually cares about people’s lives can attempt to save democracy by stepping into the power void? At least until the job inevitably corrupts them too.