Review #332: Presidents Day (2016)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #5 - Presidents Day (2016)
Hot on the heels of Heart Eyes, we get another absolute gem!
Presidents Day is a low-budget movie from Brain Damage Films, following a group of college friends who go on a holiday trip out to a cabin on President's Day (you know, like people do), when a creepy toll booth operator plants an old cryptic book about the presidents in with their belongings. One of the friends reads some latin passages from the book, and before they know it, all of the country's founding fathers begin rising from the dead and wreaking havoc on the living. These college kids have to fight to survive- whether that means firing guns, dueling with sabers, starting a new civil war, or even summoning a zombie John Wilkes Booth to do the job for them.
First things first, this is a very low-budget movie, and it looks and sounds pretty cheap. However, this movie is HILARIOUS. It knows exactly how bad it is, and doesn't try to be anything great- it sits comfortably in its low-budget niche and pokes fun at everything you expect from a zombie film. The characters are all caricatures exaggerated far past the point where they stop being funny and start being annoying, except they roll back around to being funny again. Every character exemplifies a trope, but they play it perfectly straight some of the time and subvert the trope other times. There are so many off-the-wall situations and so many little references to the various political and social idiosyncrasies of each of the presidents featured in this movie, that whether you know nothing about the presidents or if you have a degree in US History, you'll be laughing along the whole way.
It's not a perfect movie of course, as it goes on just a it longer than it probably should have (and it's only 80 minutes long, so maybe they were trying to fill time). And the pacing is really strange- the moment that feels like the typical climax of a horror film happens about 30 minutes in, but then it just goes in a completely new direction for the remainder of the movie. It could have been structured a little bit better and the story could have been reworked a tad to make it flow more smoothly, but all in all what we got was still pretty good.
I recommend this movie for anyone looking to sit around and laugh with a group of friends. The creators of this movie knew exactly what they were doing, and they clearly had a blast doing it.
Overall Rating: 9/10 Richard Nixons with Guns Akimbo
Extra Large: There's a moment in this film when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are arguing, and for some reason the argument ends with Adams starting to drop his pants to show his penis to Jefferson. (That's a sentence you probably thought you'd never read.) During this scene, Lyndon B. Johnson is in the room, and makes a comment to the effect of, "Oh, are we whippin' our dicks out?" Maybe you already know this, but maybe you don't- LBJ allegedly called his penis "Jumbo" and would show to people as a power move relatively often. (Also, another LBJ fun fact: there's an audio recording of him ordering a pair of pants on YouTube. It's not particularly interesting, except for the fact it's one of the few places you can hear a sitting president of the United States candidly refer to his "bunghole". Listen for yourself.)
Comments
Post a Comment