Monday 17 February 2020

Presidents Day (2016)

Director: David Zuckerman
Writers: Benjamin Goodwin, David Zuckerman and Jud Zumwalt
Stars: Monica Ricketts, David Zuckerman, Jud Zumwalt, Brittany Faith Rosoff, Chelsea Taylor Leech, Dax Hill, Benjamin Goodwin, Mike Ostroski and Michael Minto

Index: Horror Movie Calendar.

There are a lot of movies that look like they’d be great choices for the third Monday in February, but the list whittles itself down in no time flat. For example, I was planning to review President’s Day, a 2010 movie with a tiny $5,000 budget that was made by 25 year old Chris LaMartina, surely best known now for Call Girl of Cthulhu. However, while it did feature a mysterious murderer dressed up as Honest Abe, slashing his way through the candidates for Student Council President at Lincoln High (home of the Lincoln Lambs), it turned out to have nothing to do with the actual holiday known as President’s Day in eight states of the union, so it doesn’t count. Now, I did want it to count, just so that I could introduce you to Eddie Mills, who thinks being Student Council President would look great on his Naval Academy application. His pitch? “At Lincoln, everyone deserves a shot.” That’s glorious and, with a line like that, I don’t want to look at any other possibilities. But, sassinfrassin, this is a holiday horror book, so I had to move on.

Fortunately, this picture came along to help me out, and it’s absolutely set on what’s known as Presidents Day in three more states. That’s Presidents Day without any punctuation, unlike the President’s Day mentioned above, which features an apostrophe before the final S, or indeed Presidents’ Day, with the apostrophe after the final S, which is how the holiday is known in ten states, making it the most popular spelling. Oh, and that wandering apostrophe is just the beginning of the rabbit hole that was originally known as Washington’s Birthday, by which name it’s still known in six more states. Washington was born on 22nd February, 1732, though it was actually 11th February, 1731 at the time, because, while we think of George Washington as a famous American, he was born in the colonies of the British Empire, which was then on the Julian calendar. In 1752, the British Empire changed to the Gregorian calendar, and most people still alive at the time, Washington included, began to start celebrating according to that instead.