Founders Day is like Thanksgiving’s quieter, more polite younger brother but takes enough decent stabs at the genre to ensure it’s worth your vote -- for at least one term.

| May 21, 2024

Brothers Erik and Carson Bloomquist ... are trying to blend the conventions of the slasher genre (red herrings, multiple suspects, mutilated teenagers) with campy political satire. ... Founders Day pummels us with the obvious.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 4, 2024

It's a bit all over the place and struggles to nail a consistent tone, but when it works, it works.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 5, 2024

With a disjointed script and feeble performances, what could have been a timely metaphor for the upcoming—and dreaded—real-world election cycle unfortunately doesn’t exist.

| Jan 28, 2024

It's boring, it's cheesy, but still not fun or funny. It did not have engaging characters.

| Jan 26, 2024

Bloomquist thinks that by making a self-aware film that’s intentionally bad, the movie is beyond reproach. It’s like someone trying to meme their own photo - it just doesn’t work when you try to make yourself the butt of the joke.

| Jan 23, 2024

Founders Day is a modern horror cliché that had me asking myself, “Why should I care?” after almost every plot point, attempted jump scare, and death.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Jan 21, 2024

Lifting ideas from dozens of slasher movies that came before it, this uninspired, predictable horror satire is too tame to be really incendiary and too sluggish to be terribly surprising.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 20, 2024

If you’re looking for anything remotely fresh you won’t find it here. Otherwise, there’s enough bloody fun to satisfy the genre faithful.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 20, 2024

The intended satire [is] feeble, while the relatively straightforward horror aspects register just middling effectiveness in a standard slasher vein.

| Jan 20, 2024

A nice homage to 80s slasher films with some clever surprises.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 20, 2024

Giving this psycho-killer saga a political bent is just the charge of freshness the genre needs...though the filmmakers have wisely avoided too many direct analogs or allegories to the current situation.

| Jan 19, 2024

A couple of pedal-to-the-floor melodramatic twists suggest that “Founders Days” might’ve been a bolder or just meaner genre movie, but its toothless satire, like its timid horror drama, sadly doesn’t cut it.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 19, 2024

What it lacks in production budget, it more than makes up for in story ambition. The twists might go off the rails, but they're quite entertaining.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 19, 2024

With gory kills, a well designed villain and a decent reveal, Founders Day has the makings of a notable slasher. However, it's inconsistent tone means it's often too all over the place to be fully enjoyable

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 18, 2024

The checklist of Eighties slasher cliches here is insufferably long.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 18, 2024

“Founders Day” is so entangled with itself, it never manages to turn a hilariously convoluted plot into something memorable.

| Original Score: D | Jan 18, 2024

No serious bonafide horror movie enthusiast would allow a crapfest like this one to get by, so I won’t either. Avoid at all costs.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Jan 18, 2024

It's too busy with half-hearted melodrama and a convoluted yet predictable mystery to take advantage of such easy targets.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 18, 2024

Founders Day is a second-tier slasher that crosses too many plotlines in an overly complicated small-town massacre.

| Original Score: 6.9/10 | Jan 18, 2024