Review #342: Memorial Day (1999)


October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #15 - Memorial Day (1999)

Watch it here on YouTube!

I had a weird experience watching this movie: I watched it through one time, found it pretty dull and hard to follow for most of it, but then at the end I was actually intrigued enough to go back and watch it (or at least listen to it while I was working) for a second time, to see if I could follow it better that time. Was it worth it? Let's find out.

Memorial Day is a no-budget shot-on-video production about a group of nine friends out on a camping trip to help Rachel, one of the friends, cope with the accidental drowning of her adopted brother Danny three years previous. While everyone is sitting around the campfire telling stories and drinking beers, a masked killer starts murdering the friends one by one, until some secrets are laid bare and the truth behind Danny's death comes to light.

At first blush this movie looks and sounds terrible. It's clearly just shot on a handheld camcorder, the "camping trip" is clearly just a nearby park with some kind of a community center where they shot the indoor scenes (nobody is actually camping at any point in this movie), the characters are all one-dimensional and several of them outwardly hate one another for no reason given, and once I had gone back and experienced most of the movie twice there were some logistical parts of the plot that didn't make any sense. (One part of the killer's plan necessitated having an innocent bystander tied up in a car's trunk for sixteen hours, and I have no idea how or when they would have set that up, or why it was part of the plan in the first place.)

That all being said, the plot is actually... kind of clever? I'm intentionally not giving away the reveal of the killer because it's without question the most interesting part of this movie, and since the whole movie is free to view on YouTube I don't want to discourage anyone from going and watching it. While there's definitely some parts of the plot that don't really make sense (the aforementioned trunk hostage, also there's a scene where the killer is seen in and out of disguise in the blink of an eye which doesn't really make sense once you know their identity) a LOT of the things that didn't make sense the first time around are actually very subtly set up in earlier scenes. Now, I had to watch the movie twice in order to reconcile some stuff that really seemed like it should have been made crystal clear, but whatever, I can tell that this movie was taken seriously by at least SOME of the people involved.

And on that note, I actually noticed something in the IMDB trivia that I'm trying really hard not to color my review, so I'm going to just lay it out here: I was going to give this a really low score, just because it's not really very good overall and like so many of the other no-budget shot-on-video movies I've watched, I often think in my head "this movie looks like someone's class project" which is always meant in a disparaging way. Well, in the case of Memorial Day, it actually WAS a class project that a group of college students made, and on a whim one of the people involved submitted it to some sort of a distribution company and before they knew it, their movie had gotten nationwide distribution. So part of me wants to actually rate it a couple points higher than I would have otherwise, because- well, they succeeded at exactly what they were trying to do! This wasn't meant to be a big production, it was literally a student film that suddenly was being shown to the world. I don't think I am going to factor that into my rating- the quality of the movie is the quality of the movie, I shouldn't let the backstory influence that- but I do want to give the filmmakers credit for their accomplishment, even if I don't think their accomplishment quite stands up to the other offerings out there.

So, this movie isn't great, but for what it is, it could be a lot worse.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Papier Mache Masks

Memorial Day Trivia: I didn't have any other little tidbits about this movie, so I looked up some trivia about the holiday it takes place on. Did you know that Memorial Day unofficially marks the beginning of "peak hot dog season"? Also, Memorial Day- originally called Decoration Day- started as a holiday honoring the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, and the city of Waterloo, New York is recognized as the official birthplace of the holiday.

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