Avis Metacritic

A sharp, funny, and bizarrely responsible documentary about an amusement park in Vernon, New Jersey.

The documentary infers a good deal about Mulvihill’s underworld connections and political maneuvers without quite nailing them down.

The movie's just pure fun; a cock-eyed Valentine to a place so outrageous that death or dismemberment was an actual acceptable risk — but so was the chance to live, as one former security guard fondly recalls, in “an ‘80s movie that was real life. And it will never happen again.”

Like the resort it captures, everything in this film is fun and games right up until the moment someone gets seriously injured.

Class Action Park loses its footing somewhat in the closing passages; Scott and Porges don’t seem to know quite how to wrap things up, and the film’s big tonal shift is a turning point that is all but impossible to come back from.

Yet Porges (who pops up as an expert talking head) and co-director Chris Charles Scott III never quite hit an even tone - or rather, there's a big divide, like bouncing along on a kiddy coaster that suddenly turns into a brutal corkscrew with a massive drop at the end.

For those interested only in a visual fleshing-out of a Wikipedia entry, Class Action Park does the job. Anyone hoping for more won’t find it in this unremarkable piece of nostalgia-bait.

Narrated quite drolly by comedian John Hodgman, Class Action Park is very funny in its dark way, the interviewees are all charmingly surprised that they lived through their teenage years and there’s a remarkable amount of action footage from the park, considering that it predates cellphones. (The animation by Richard Langberg is amusing, too.) Where the film has a problem is Mulvihill.

Class Action Park tries with only partial success to capture the dissonance between the funny war stories told about that hazardous site and how awful and tragic it was that young people lost their lives there.

For all its attempts to build itself into something more substantive, it’s still a day at the theme park.