There’s something very satisfying about the late American filmmaker George A. Romero sometimes referred to as the “godfather of zombies” refusing to stay dead.
After passing away from lung cancer in 2017, he continues to loom large over popular culture; his transcendent zombie series that shuddered to life with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead has inspired a mob of mutant offspring most recently Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead while the flurry of Romero-adjacent activity includes restorations, soon-to-be realised scripts, as well as newly re-discovered completed works.
The latest is 1973’s The Amusement Park, a “lost” film that enjoyed a few festival outings but was basically relegated to the vault, until almost a half century later when it was painstakingly restored from two badly washed-out 16mm prints.
Originally commissioned as an hour-long educational film about the plight of the elderly by the Lutheran Service Society in the director’s adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, the project saw Romero broke after a copyright gaffe and a string of commercial flops step in as a director-for-hire and then make it his own.
The Lutherans were not impressed.
The film opens innocently enough: in a direct-to-camera address, the stately 70-year-old narrator and star Lincoln Maazel outlines how society tragically neglects the elderly, and introduces the film’s brazen set-up, using the scruffy West View Park fairgrounds as a stand-in for the wider world.
“We intend for you to feel the problem, to experience it,” he says, words that should tip off any horror fan to the nature of the coming drama.
In 2017, Italy’s Torino Film Festival screened The Amusement Park in their Romero retrospective, leading to its ‘rediscovery’.(Supplied: Shudder
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Maazel, all smiles, enters a white cube waiting room, now wearing a white tuxedo suit similar to the one he would memorably don four years later as the religious grandfather in Martin, Romero’s blood-soaked, much-needed hit.
Maazel addresses the sole occupant a bleeding and battered old man (also Maazel) who refuses to join him on the outing then steps inside the park.
Crowds of all ages move in every direction: a boisterous parade of 70s suburban fashions, serenaded by chintzy carnival tunes and the clatter of rollercoasters, in a sequence that captures Romero’s keen eye for the living, breathing textures of blue-collar communities and equally for chaos.
After negotiating with a shady pawn dealer-type who swindles seniors in exchange for ride tickets, Maazel encounters bureaucratic signs with unsettling messages (‘Must not fear the unknown’) and glimpses monstrous faces amongst the passengers.
The frequent handheld camerawork and grainy 16mm format pitch the images somewhere between a low-budget documentary and a home video from hell.
Romero’s wife, producer Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, didn’t know the movie existed until 2017. She and Romero watched it together three weeks before he passed away.(Supplied: Shudder
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From here, the drama spirals nightmarishly; a spin on the bumper cars turns into a mock real-world accident with cops, lawyers and insurance agents materialising as if out of thin air, while the arrogant young man at fault hollers, “If there’s anything stupider than a woman driver it’s an old woman driver! Everyone over 65 should be made to ride the bus.”
Across a series of episodes, escalating and unjust violence is inflicted upon Maazel.
Playing out like the biblical downfall in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, The Amusement Park sees its hero knocked over, robbed, beaten, accused of paedophilia, chased by a frenzied mob and left spiritually broken his mouth stuck gaping feebly in horror, and his curly hair unravelling into an unruly mop by film’s end.
The surreal, fatalistic images are sometimes bitterly funny, like the pathetic bandage that is affixed to an open wound on his head as he’s callously rushed through a first-aid department.
Others are downright bitter, like the abject visions of old age forecast by a fortune teller to a loved-up young couple, capped by the prophecy of the now-old man left on his deathbed in a roach-infested tenement house while the now-old woman wails for someone to help.
Desrocher-Romero has described The Amusement Park as “so edgy, and so different, and so harsh, and relevant”.(Supplied: Shudder
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Romero’s filmography is marked by heavy cynicism, born from the disappointments of the 60s, and the era’s utopian dreams gone to seed. He shows great empathy with the disenfranchised while making humorous, winning targets of consumerism, capitalism and authority figures like the church, government and army.
Clearly in sync with Romero’s concerns, The Amusement Park is set in motion by its politics, but the director was also clearly excited to use this as an excuse for stylistic excess.
Ageism becomes a springboard for inventive set-ups and flashy edits, accompanied by hallucinatory sequences and goofy oversized props all of which entrench Maazel’s feelings of disorientation and despair.
Shot in just three days, the industrial film showcases Romero’s inspiring ability to spin magic from meagre resources; a similarly discomfiting imagination is on display in his low-budget features made around the same time, 1972’s under-appreciated Season of the Witch and 1973’s bio-horror The Crazies.
“I was concerned that the zombie fan would not like it,” Desrocher-Romero told Gizmodo.(Supplied: Shudder
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Resurrected from the grave, The Amusement Park is not exactly a lost masterpiece, or even one of Romero’s top-tier works but it’s a roguish, frenetic curio, laced with a handful of unforgettable images.
Its plea for compassion to be shown to the elderly which, five decades later, remains low on social agendas, even during a pandemic that has placed seniors at extreme risk is also a savage indictment of an uncaring world, from which no one is spared.
“Remember as you watch the film, one day you will be old,” says Maazel in the opening narration, a banal truth that becomes as frightening as the macabre fable itself.
The Amusement Park is available to stream on Shudder from June 8.
