Rating: ★★½

George A. Romero (1940-2017) has a legendary reputation in genre material. This is the man who created the modern zombie film with Night of the Living Dead (1968) and then went on to create a string of sequels, along with other classic genre works ranging from The Crazies (1973) to Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Creepshow (1982). (See below for a list of George Romero’s other films).

The Amusement Park gained some fascination when it resurfaced on dvd in 2019, where it was sold as a lost Romero film. It was originally made back in 1973 where Romero was commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania to make an educational film that highlighted the issue of elder abuse and neglect. The 54-minute film premiered at the American Film Festival in June 1975. The results appeared not to be what the Lutherans thought they were getting and they only held a handful of screenings. The film made sporadic appearances at Romero related festivals through the years until a print was sent to Romero following a screening at the Torino Film Festival in 2001. It was subsequently given a dvd restoration under the supervision of his widow Suzanne Desrocher.

The discovery of a lost Romero film has perhaps given The Amusement Park an inflated reputation. You suspect if it had come out a few years earlier when Romero was still alive, the response might have been more along the lines of “oh, that’s sort of interesting.” Here it is being promoted as a lost horror classic with comments like “Romero diverts aside from zombies and makes a film more about the horrors of aging”-type and much given over to its supposed nightmare-like quality.

Yeah, no. First of all, Romero was working as a director for hire for a church-based social services group, this is not him making a passion project. This makes The Amusement Park less the work of a genre auteur and belongs more down among Romero’s earlier work in commercials. It is by no means uninteresting. It’s an odd, quirky but sometimes also an awkwardly constructed work. It exists more in the realm of a work of Surrealism and in particular social satire and allegory but there is nothing about it that can be considered a horror film. You could maybe draw some similarities between the surreal images of people wandering an amusement park and the haunted tone of Carnival of Souls (1962) but that is a stretch.

The film opens with Lincoln Maazel, memorable as Tati Cuda in Romero’s next film Martin (1976), who approaches the camera and spends 3½ minutes introducing the film and speaking of the plight of the elderly. We then have a scene in a room all in white where a wounded version of Maazel sits while another version of himself comes to talk to him before venturing out through the door into the amusement park. It becomes apparent that this is an allegory for the elderly being shut-in versus venturing into the uncertain perils of the outside world.

Thereafter, we get assorted scenarios with Lincoln Maazel wandering around the amusement park, all of which are set up to illustrate the thesis of elder neglect or how society disadvantages the aged. We see scenes such as people riding dodgem cars and getting into an accident (where the other driver is played by Romero) and this is dismissed by police because the driver is aged. A fortune teller tells the fortunes of a young couple and sees their future together as an elderly couple living in an apartment with an indifferent landlord and not being able to access proper medical services.

Various of the scenarios are awkwardly wound around to being staged at an amusement park. Maazel attends a restaurant – which is set at tables out in the open on the midway where he is shuffled off to one side and indifferently served while all the attention goes to one man who comes in with a conspicuous display of money. In another open-air scene set at a desk in the middle of the concourse, an elderly man has his driver’s license cancelled by someone because of eyesight issues. Maazel picks up groceries from one of the concession stands but is forced to leave some of them because he cannot get any help carrying the bags and so on,

Clearly, this is Romero having obtained permission to shoot at an amusement park (West View Park in Pennsylvania, which closed down in 1977). Thus the amusement park becomes a loose metaphor to illustrate assorted problems that the elderly face. The effect is more an allegory that is using the journey through the fairground to make some sort of point about the film’s central thesis. It is an allegory that is sometimes effective but not something that meets my definition of horror. And that makes The Amusement Park itself an oddity that is more for the Romero completest than a fascinating undiscovered work.

George A. Romero’s other films include the cult favourite Night of the Living Dead (1968); the suburban witchcraft film Jack’s Wife/Season of the Witch/Hungry Wives (1972); The Crazies (1973), an underrated film about a madness-inducing biospill; Martin (1976), a superb deconstruction of the cinematic vampire myth; Dawn of the Dead (1978); the Stephen King-scripted horror comic homage Creepshow (1982); Day of the Dead (1985); Monkey Shines (1988) about a psychic link between a paraplegic and a murderous monkey; Two Evil Eyes (1990), an Edgar Allan Poe collaboration with Dario Argento; The Dark Half (1993) from the Stephen King novel about a writer haunted by an evil doppelganger; Bruiser (2000) about a man whose face suddenly becomes a blank mask; Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009). Romero has also produced the Tales from the Darkside (1983-5) and Monsters (1988-9) horror anthology series, and the films Deadtime Stories (2009) and Deadtime Stories 2 (2010). His scripts include Creepshow II (1987), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) and the remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990).

Trailer here