The Amusement Park

 
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Lincoln Maazel, Harry Albacker, Phyllis Casterwiler, Pete Chovan, Sally Erwin
Running Time: 52 min.
Rating: Unrated

★★★★ (out of ★★★★)

When legendary horror director George A. Romero was commissioned by the Lutheran Society in 1973 to make an educational film on elder abuse, they ended up getting more than they bargained for with his surrealistic nightmare, The Amusement Park. Shelved due to its disturbing content and perceived failure at accomplishing the mission at hand, this intended PSA has long been discussed in cinematic circles as one of those great lost treasures that probably wouldn't ever see the light of day. Think Jerry Lewis' The Day The Clown Cried, minus the baggage. Now, almost fifty years later, the George A. Romero Foundation (a nonprofit founded by his widow, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero) has restored the film, and after being purchased by Yellow Veil Pictures, the rediscovered effort has premiered on the Shudder streaming service. And it's really something else. 

While criticisms could certainly be leveled that's it's almost too ambitious to effectively function as a traditional PSA, but not large enough in scope to qualify as the masterpiece many expected, it still comes dangerously close, making for a fascinating experiment that's just as socially relevant today as then. Containing many tenets that would inform the director's later work, it's easy to see how it was shelved, even if having the message delivered in this manner leaves a traumatizing imprint that wouldn't be possible without Romero's distinctive approach. Depressingly cruel and punishing at only 52 minutes, the abbreviated length works to its favor, even as the entire scenario and lead performance will probably have you too shaken to check the time.

Besides functioning as a invaluable period piece, it takes public perceptions of amusement and theme parks and turns them on its head, reminding us just how truly unpleasant a trip to a bad one can be for anyone, regardless of age. Existing somewhere between reality and metaphorical fantasy, this park's amongst the more hellish you'll see, particularly for a protagonist with whom everyone will eventually relate. That's ultimately the film's most powerful statement, as this seemingly innocuous outing rapidly disintegrates into a fable of mortality, with a man staring down the barrel of a culture's complete disregard for his existence. 

A painfully true testament to how society degrades then disposes of its elderly population, Romero really does pile it on here, but rarely without purpose. Far from straightforward "horror" in any conventional sense, it's still every bit as as terrifying, with images and sequences that linger in the mind long after the credits roll. It's just a shame that a film capable of making such an impact instead collected dust for almost half century for being both of and ahead of its time.  

Shot at the now-defunct West View Park in West View Pennsylvania and bookended by Twilight Zone-like narration from its lead actor, the film focuses on an elderly gentleman (Lincoln Maazel) in a white suit who bares more than a passing resemblance to Colonel Sanders. If only he were treated with as much reverence as that iconic restaurateur upon his entry into an amusement park that's populated by visitors of all ages, but has a harsh pecking order. It opens with him entering a mysterious door into a white, sterile room, and despite warnings from someone he really should listen to, he remains enthusiastic and undeterred about his upcoming excursion into the park. 

All that optimism quickly fades when the man's faced with what initially seems like merely dismissive treatment, before it escalates into far greater forms of discrimination with each passing stop. Wading his way through this claustrophobic, overcrowded atmosphere, he's constantly marginalized along with others his age and even harassed, beaten, and verbally abused by younger parkgoers unsympathetic to his plight. Bruised, battered and limping his way to what could be his final destination, this ordinary day out reveals itself to be a true living hell.

Strung together as a continuous series of vignettes, the unnamed elderly man is confronted by various forms of hostility, but he's hardly the only one, as many of these situations break the barriers of ageism and enter territories of racism and classism as well. While the man's immediately segregated with his contemporaries, it's actually quite startling how many elderly citizens are in this park and that the amount of business they bring do little to temper how badly they're treated. 

What's even sadder is that a lot of these people aren't even THAT old. When one of the characters reveal they're in their sixties it's kind of a shock, mainly because these patrons (who, with the exception of Maazel, aren't professionally trained actors) all look much older than they likely are. It's yet another reminder of how much and little has changed since 1973, as advances in medicine and self-care have enabled us to look younger for longer, but caused the age at which one is considered "old" to drop precipitously. You could actually imagine a modern-day remake where a 35 year-old is kicked and dragged out the park for their advanced age as if it were a bizarro version of Logan's Run. 

These observations may carry false pretenses that this is an actual amusement park and what we see is to be taken literally rather than some nightmarish hallucination taking place within the man's mind. If it's not, the film still works as an all-encompassing metaphor, as many of its memorable sequences sharply illustrate. At a makeshift restaurant, he's given humiliatingly shoddy service while a wealthy, well-dressed cigar-smoking customer is waited on hand and foot by the staff. A policeman arrives to settle a bumper car fender bender and shames an elderly couple. And Romero even manages to deliver a scathing commentary on the health care system and nursing home facilities as the protagonist attempts to escape what looks to be an unfortunate inevitability. 

In what may be its most ambitious sequence, a fortune teller gives a young hippie couple glimpses into a future that looks mighty bleak, if not far scarier than the old man's. The flashforward is a chilling distillation of Romero's intentions, as well as the perfect encapsulation of the film's cruelest twist; that the tormentors don't have much further to go before they find themselves on the receiving end of the ignorance they've willingly participated in.

As the anonymous elderly gentleman is circled like vultures by a biker gang and even literally has a book closed on him during his sole moment of human acceptance, it's clear we're witnessing the passage of time right before our eyes. Though this was filmed only a few years later, it's hard not to be reminded of my favorite pictures of the era, Frank Perry's The Swimmer, when considering the trajectory Romero puts this character on. While that dealt with aging, the passing of time and human cruelty by way of a journey through the neighborhood's pools by its far more flawed and unsympathetic lead, this substitutes an amusement park as a setting for events that could be borne from reality, hallucinations or possibly death. 

Like that film, there's also a mental and physical deterioration that occurs with each new interaction, as if the man's entire lifespan has been compressed into a single day. By its end, he's a shell of himself, heading back to the white waiting room from which he came to repeat the process again, and like so many in the park, failing either out of fear or denial, to heed the advice of those who came before. It may be the irony of all ironies that actor Lincoln Maazel (who would appear again in Romero's 1978 thriller, Martin) ended up passing away in 2009 at the age of 106, having still not lived long enough to see his shattering performance exposed to the masses and given the credit it deserves. 

The film's satirically sarcastic tagline, "I'll see you in the park, someday." couldn't be more fitting in reflecting the obliviousness of the movie's antagonists, behaving without a care in the world that their time is coming. Less a brutal critique of ageism than a damning indictment of the lack of basic human decency, Romero never shied away from calling out the shallowness of American materialism, as he'd later demonstrate in Dawn of the Dead. But there's something almost entirely darker and sadder going on here in watching this defeated, ostracized man entirely shut out by those who can only hope they're someday granted the grace and compassion they fail to offer him. It's a true to life terror resonating more now than perhaps it ever could back then. And in that sense, Romero didn't have any idea just how right he'd eventually be.