Slasher movies are delightful! For such often straightforward, simplistic concepts, they can offer such versatility. From full-blown cinematic masterpieces like John Carpenter’s “Halloween” to midnight-movie-madness like Tom McLoughlin’s “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives,” this horrific subgenre can run the gamut of filmic ambitions. And regardless of scale or scope, when done well, they are an undeniably satisfying movie-going experience.

Sadly, the new slasher film, “Founders Day,” is a decidedly less than satisfying movie-going experience. The so-called ‘satirical political slasher’ fails to provide even the most base-level joys of its genre elements. It is a film whose idea of biting satire is just to regurgitate the most trite and flaccid observations of partisanship politics imaginable, and whose idea of a slasher feels like it’s been relayed through an increasingly unverified game of telephone, in which the final result feels like a jumbled and incoherent mess.

---

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT FOUNDERS DAY

5. Weak Spot: The Music

The musical score of “Founders Day” is about as subtle and nuanced as the script’s ideas on American politics. In other words, the music is blunt, brutish, and often unintentionally hysterical. Here, what you see is what you get, to a comical degree.

If the killer is attacking someone? Lay on the excessively loud musical stingers for every single beat of the attack with full-on distortion every single time. If someone is having an emotionally fraught conversation with another character? Hit some sparse high notes on the piano. If someone is acting suspicious or sinister? Lay on the thick minor chords.

None of this would be particularly bad in isolation, but it’s the sheer mind-numbing repetition of each of these that really wears one down. If you score every single scare of the film (even the fakeouts) with the same cranked-up-to-11 intensity, it isn’t long before it ceases to have any impact at all.

4. Weak Spot: The Tonal Dissonance

I’m not really sure what tone “Founders Day” was going for, and I’m not positive the team making it was either. There are certainly moments that veer into camp, but the intentionality of those moments feels entirely up for debate.

The horror is played almost exclusively straightforwardly, and as evidenced by the aforementioned musical score, “Founders Day” clearly wants audiences to take these moments deadly seriously. But when they are so regularly prefaced or directly followed by bursts of entirely unearned, fiercely over-the-top melodrama, it’s incredibly jarring.

Meanwhile, some of the characters (especially the two mayoral candidates) just feel like their scenes have been cut in from entirely different films, with a rhythm, pace, and tone so wholly divorced from the rest of “Founders Day” that it is befuddling.

In this way, the tone of “Founders Day” never coalesces into anything definitive, resulting in a film that feels muddy and unsure of itself the whole way through.

3. At Least Folks Are Having Fun

Look, if nothing else, “Founders Day” does feature some capable performers who at least seem to be having a good time cutting loose. It’s a film full of scenery-salivating, hammy performances. I wouldn’t call any of them particularly good, seeing as they all feel a bit fundamentally misguided to some degree within the context of this film, but they are fun to watch in their own right, which is nice.

Also, there are lots of practical gory effects here, and they are staged with more love and attention than anything else in the film, so it’s nice that the folks behind the camera at least got their passion to shine through here.

2. Weak Spot: The Reveal

In vintage giallo/slasher fashion, “Founders Day” centers around a masked killer whose identity is the subject of much mystery and intrigue. And while the film is absolutely littered with performers hamming it up and giving quasi-villainous monologues to try and sway audience opinion, it is pretty painfully obvious who the actual killer is very quickly. The sheer number of times the movie cuts to this character whenever someone speculates about the killer’s identity is enough to make a drinking game based on it turn deadly.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the fact that the finale of “Founders Day” then goes out of its way to pat itself on the back for its needlessly convoluted justification of this and painstakingly holds the audience’s hand throughout the entire reveal, as if it’s the most shocking thing to ever hit the screen, is a bit much to stomach.

I do find it amusing that both this and Eli Roth’s recently released “Thanksgiving” have these huge casts of young performers and then precisely one seasoned veteran actor playing a seemingly minor role, and they are then inevitably revealed to be the killer. It just loses a bit of its shock when you feel like you can pick the identity of the killer based solely off of reading a cast list beforehand.

1. Weak Spot: The Editing

The editing of “Founders Day” is atrocious. In fact, I would go so far as to say that pretty much every other weak spot on this list is either a direct result of, or at least made infinitely worse by, the editing.

The setpieces are incoherent and utterly unintelligible, something that the film is apparently so proud of that it loops back around to it and makes it an actual story beat later in the film. Performances constantly feel like they are being cobbled together from entirely disparate takes, with juxtaposed deliveries. There are dozens of shallow-focus close-ups throughout the film that are held on for inexplicably long amounts of time after the subject of the frame has been moved, leaving you to just stare at buzzed-out blurriness for no reason.

All of this culminates in a film that feels like watching an assembly cut of raw footage rather than an actual edited film, cut with intention and purpose. Barring some entirely unforeseen atrocity down the line, “Founders Day” has to be a top contender for one of the worst-edited films audiences are likely to see in a theater this year.

---

RGM GRADE

(F)

Watching “Founders Day” is akin to listening to someone tell you a campfire story that they only half-remember and during which they consistently emphasized the wrong syllables. It’s a vague, undefined approximation of the subgenre that feels unnaturally disjointed.

There are fleeting moments of joy to be had, but they all feel like they come at the expense of the film itself and what it’s attempting to accomplish. It’s ultimately a ‘political slasher’ in name only, proving entirely incapable of articulating any larger themes or ideas with anything resembling coherence.