Movie Review: 'The Amusement Park' Lost George Romero Movie Found and Restored

I was perhaps a little too excited when I got word that a new George A. Romero movie from the early 1970s had been uncovered and fully restored. I, like so many others, am a huge fan of Romero from all of the Living Dead movies. He’s a storied figure in the history of horror and the notion that a piece of his work had been found and was fully restored, it captured my imagination and made me think that I was about to have a profound experience.

My expectations for the 52 minute presentation, The Amusement Park, were far too high. The Amusement Park appears to have been lost to time for a reason. The film was commissioned by The Lutheran Society of Pennsylvania as an educational film about elder abuse. The Lutheran Society was so disappointed and disturbed by what Romero delivered to them in The Amusement Park that they shelved it. It was uncovered in 2018 and given a 4K restoration by Indie Collect.

The Amusement Park centers on a mysterious elderly gentleman in a white suit, portrayed by Lincoln Maazel. The man proceeds to explain what we are about to see, a program on the ways in which modern society, of 1973, mistreats and dissocializes the elderly. By shunting the eldely into old folks homes or dismissing their opinions and contributions, we’ve disenfranchised the elderly in ways that are downright abusive. This morality play takes the form of an amusement park of horrors.

The Amusement Park unfolds in an episodic form. We begin inside a pristine white room. Our elderly narrator sits in this room crying, whimpering, and bloodied. Into the room walks the same elderly man in the same white suit only he’s well appointed and happily unharmed. He asks this other version of himself, as if he doesn’t recognize him, if he’d like to go outside with him. The battered old man tells this new version of himself that there is nothing good out there and that he should not go outside. The new man however, is undaunted.

He proceeds through the door and finds an amusement park. Immediately we are overwhelmed by the buzz, the crowds of people, and the lonely man standing out against this sea of people who are oblivious to his existence. After observing for a few moments, the man finds a line to purchase tickets for the rides. This line however, is much more sinister than it seems. The carnival worker is trading tickets for objects that have special meaning to the elderly people trying to trade them. The man low balls them and takes their sacred item for well less than what it is worth.

Our protagonist buys tickets with cash rather than an item but complains about the prices and his fixed income. The carnival worker could not possibly care less. With tickets in hand, our elderly gentleman decides to ride a roller coaster but first he has to overcome the ageist signs that indicate that not all elderly people are allowed to ride. It’s for their own protection, if they have certain conditions, they aren’t allowed on the ride. Once on the roller coaster, our hero appears shocked at the many twists and turns and seems to regret the decision to ride.

From here we proceed through a series of strange indignities. On a bumper car ride, the gentleman witnesses a fender bender between a young man and an elderly couple. The young man berates the elderly female driver and blames her age for the accident, though he was clearly at fault. Our hero tries to intervene when Police arrive only for him to be dismissed as a witness because he wasn’t wearing his glasses.

At a restaurant, a rich older man is catered to eagerly by the staff while our hero is almost ignored. When the rich man sees our fixed income protagonist, he demands that he not have to look at this poor person while he eats. Our hero leaves after making a bit of a scene handing his food over to even poorer people who have even less than he does. From here he tries to buy groceries for some reason but finds the grocery store workers indifferent to his struggle with too many bags.

Another rather absurd scene finds the elderly gentlemen spying on a young couple visiting a fortune teller. She tells of a future in which the couple remain together into old age only to find their tiny home crumbling and the husband dying dubiously unaided by an uncaring medical system. From there, indignities pile upon indignities until our protagonist is left as the only person in the park and we find out how he ended up back in that white room so battered and disheveled.

It’s not hard to figure out why the Lutherans were so baffled by The Amusement Park. The movie has no narrative per se, merely a series of episodes connected by the presence of our protagonist, outside of the fortune teller scene which is the only scene our hero does not appear in. The Amusement Park certainly does illustrate the horrors that face the elderly on a daily basis but it is also so obscure and abstract that the point tends to get lost in Romero’s artistry.

The most impressive thing about The Amusement Park is its very existence. The fact that the Lutheran League of Pennsylvania decided to fund a horror movie about aging is weirdly fascinating. It’s also quite interesting that the movie was lost for nearly 50 years on the shelves of The Lutheran Society before someone stumbled across it. I want to hear that story and the story of how it was processed and remastered for 4K. That story appears more interesting to me than the product of that story.

The Amusement Park will be available on the Shudder app beginning on Tuesday, June 8th, 2021.