The Amusement Park

THE AMUSEMENT PARK (1975/2019) Shot in 1973 and shelved after a couple of showings in 1975, this George Romero public service film about elder abuse has been rediscovered and remastered.

In many ways, this is a pretty remarkable document. It's a one hour semi-surrealist nightmare about an elderly man (Lincoln Manzel, who also does the introduction) who goes to an Amusement Park. There, he experiences the nightmare rides of his life: Driving, health care, indifferent and even hostile youth, poverty and just general neglect. Not having to adhere to a set 'plot', frees Romero to create some of his most striking scenarios. One bit about the man being shooed away while he's eating crackers and peanut butter and then having rats descend upon his food is as horrifying as anything in his Living Dead pictures. Romero understood that 'reality' is as frightening as anything one could conjure. It's clear why the film was just too odd, too real, for its intended purpose of being a PSA (it was financed by the Lutheran Service Society).

It's not perfect, but THE AMUSEMENT PARK is a glimpse at what Romero could have achieved if he hadn't been pigeonholed. He often played with other styles when making his commercials and industrial films (a Calgon commercial done as a parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE etc.). This film was shot just before THE CRAZIES and one will notice several of Romero's past and future collaborators in the credits such as Richard R. Rubenstein, the Hinzmans and Michael Gornick. It's a fascinating film that is worthy of reappraisal.

Trivia: Manzel (who was also ion Romero's MARTIN) was 70 when he shot the film. He lived another 36 years! The location, West View Park in Pennsylvania, closed just four years after this movie was made.

When I first heard George Romero had squirreled away this movie where it couldn't be viewed my first thought was that it was probably awful. In hindsight, this was an understatement.

The Amusement Park comes across as an extended student film that tries to be clever but winds up being both predictable and dull. It doesn't help that the film's introduction basically tells you what you're about to see, making the viewing experience somewhat redundant, and the overblown in-your-face visuals combined with the non-stop cacophonous screaming on the soundtrack makes the 53 minute running time seem like a day and a half.

The "restoration" clearly ran out of money at some point as constant scratches and wildly uneven color balancing totally destroy any concentration the viewer might attempt - not that there's anything to really concentrate on. The bottom line is that it's a bombastic assault of both image and sound that's somehow supposed to indicate that society's elderly are getting a raw deal. And it fails spectacularly in attempting to communicate this sensitive theme.

It makes for nice marketing to imply that the film's financiers found the finished work to be too unsettling, gruesome, horrifying (all of which were used in the ballyhoo trumpeting this film's release,) but in truth it's just not a very good movie and really should've been kept hidden indefinitely.

But, since George's name has a dollar value attached to it and he's no longer a meal ticket to certain people, it's not surprising that this "discovery" was plucked from its dark closet, hurriedly patched together (by the talented colorist of such complex works as Pawn Stars, no less,) and auctioned off to the highest bidder as a "lost" Romero classic.

But the fanboys will still throw money at it because it's "George A. Romero" and they couldn't care less about being bilked as long as their obsession is fed.

The things greedy people do to make money . . it gets no more shameful than this.

The topic of elderly people being mistreated in Western society is a perfectly noble one to cover in film. That doesn't exempt filmmakers from providing a story though, or character development of any kind. There's essentially zero of either in The Amusement Park, a "lost film" from the late George Romero that I'd wager is getting praised by critics because of context more than anything.

There isn't much of a film here. Our main character orates to the camera for a few minutes at the beginning, explaining just how poorly seniors are treated. Then for the next 45 odd minutes, seniors are treated poorly at an amusement park. The film plays like a not-particularly-good colourized episode of the Twilight Zone, or perhaps more accurately The Ray Bradbury Theatre.

Was excited for this based on the hype, but sadly it proved little more than a mildly curious historical novelty. Heck of a poster though.

Answer: The Amusement Park, an hour-long film on the terrible way society treats the elder commissioned by the Lutherans and directed by the great George Romero in 1973 but not seen until now. I can only imagine that the investors, upon seeing it, said, "WTF did we pay for???"

While it is what it is--a public service film on ageism--there's no mistaking that Romero directed it. (He even shows up as a nasty patron of the park's bumper cars.) It's extremely avant garde, humorless, and depressing. But it's well done on its nothing budget and still has a lot to say on the subject today. No, it's not so terrible or unfinished that it couldn't have been released back in the day. It's was just too much. (And kudos to George's widow and the George A. Romero Foundation for doing a nice job restoring it from a couple of faded 16mm prints.) It's worth a look as a weird curio and footnote to the career of the greatest horror director who ever lived.

An old geezer wanders around an amusement park for 50 minutes. There's something about it that feels hypnotic and intriguing though. Many of Romero's directorial flourishes and styles are rough and recognisable here, and there's a Horror/Nightmarish vibe to the whole thing. That being said, I kind of needed more from it to give it higher than an alright watch. Not a bad little lost project though, and there's at least a purpose to the whole picture.

5.5/10.