Founders Day

Like many film buffs, the Star Wars films often cross my mind so, in many ways, it's not that surprising that a line from Star Wars: The Last Jedi crossed my thoughts as I endured retro-slasher snooze fest Founders Day: "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to."

Writer/director Erik Bloomquist and sibling co-writer Carson already raided the corpse of this particular horror subgenre with the more knowing but no more competent She Came From the Woods. There, they were shamelessly ripping off the summer camp vibes of the Friday the 13th films, but this time it's all My Bloody Valentine small-town secrets, but then further weighed down by a truly gormless political analogy. Not only is there a serial killer dressed like (you guessed it) a founding father beating people to death with a gavel and the scales of justice, but there's a high stakes mayoral election going on. Well, not really high stakes, but that's what we're told, as the pantsuit-clad Mayor Gladwell (McCarthy) is being challenged by weird-haired businessman Harold Faulkner (Bartok) which, inevitably, will factor in somehow.

The checklist of Eighties slasher cliches here is insufferably long. A masked killer with some weird motivation. The pair of mocking high school lovers who end up on the slab because they can't take anything seriously. The personality-free investigative protagonist who is linked to the killings. The sad sack ex-boyfriend. The bad-tempered current beau. The adults who try to pretend nothing is happening. The red herring characters. The only update to the usually lily-white and straight Eighties casting equation is that final girl Allison (Grace) is a Black lesbian, but she's still utterly immemorable. As for that political element, it's asinine and insulting, making The Purge's breezy black satire look like Das Kapital.

Maybe it's that whole Eighties slasher revival idea. It's like doing a Keystone Kops movie in the 1950s, and Abbott and Costello did that, and it's awful. The classic era of teens and killers was actually dead by 1986, when it was all either being spoofed by April Fool's Day, deconstructed as in The Hitcher, or driven into the franchise dirt, à la Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Nearly four decades later, and we're still drowning in time-wasting, manipulative, derivative, fake Eighties ripoffs like Founders Day. If you're going to dig the same shallow grave for the thousandth time, at least have the verve of Eli Roth's shamelessly fun Thanksgiving – or at least make sure the entire cast knows if you're going for tension or comedy. Otherwise, I'm begging you: Let the past die.