THE AMUSEMENT PARK

I just finished watching The Amusement Park, the 48-years-‘lost’ film by George A Romero, which came out streaming today, and I wanted to write something while I am still in the film’s brutal underwater-scream slipstream.

Wow. Just…wow. Jesus Christ. That was depressing as Hell.

Romero made The Amusement Park in 1973 for the Lutheran Society, who wanted to make a statement about abuse of the elderly in contemporary society. The film they got was apparently way too grim and horrifying for them, so it just dropped off world cinema radar for nearly a half-century. A print surfaced in 2017, and was given a 4K clean-up by American film restoration organisation IndieCollect.

And was it worthy of the restoration?

Absolutely.

And how.

Quite aside from the fact that this is an excellent film that was utterly unknown amongst Romero fans (amongst whom I count myself) until very recently, with the man saying not a peep about it, as a sociological and psychological and timestamp-snapshot artistic statement, from a man near the start of his stellar indie horror career…this is just a damned good film. Any Romero fan going into it will not find it to be a horror film, though. It’s definitely horrifying, probably hands-down the Godfather of Gore’s most brutal and disturbing film. I say that without a word of hyperbole, and as somebody who has seen all of George Andrew Romero’s films. This one is definitely well worth a watch, for both Romero completists and the casual cinema fan alike.

And the reason it’s his most brutal, bludgeoning creepshow? Because you can imagine all of it happening.

I will now have some spoilers in the review (I am not thinking about this, by the way, just throwing it down and out there, unedited, spontaneous), so anybody wanting to watch the film without having any of it ruined for them should just stop reading. There you go, done my due diligence.

Now. Romero himself did not write this film, which is a rarity for his work. It was written by somebody called Wally Cook, and, poking around the net, I can find no information about him. I don’t want to read any other reviews before writing this one, so maybe some other write-up has info on him, but I doubt it. Suffice to say he was an unknown quantity. Which, given how incredibly powerful this film is, and if he was a complete unknown for his whole career, is a sad thing indeed.

But definitely not as sad as the film itself.

The start of the film introduces us to Lincoln Maazel, star of the 1978 Romero could-be-vampire classic Martin, where he played elderly religious fanatic Tata Cuda. Here he is standing at a Pennsylvania amusement park (and the proper title for this film should be The Abusement Park, considering the pensioner abuse that goes on in it) pontificating to the camera about growing old and how we treat the elderly, and why we should be better to them as we will be old one day ourselves. It basically renders the whole film, as noted before, as a public service announcement about getting involved with organisations to help the elderly…while you’re still young and strong and there’s still time.

Maazel’s character then enters the amusement park and the film itself begins. He encounters a bleeding, weeping, exhausted version of himself in a white, sterile, joyless room. He tries to engage with himself, saying he wants to check out what’s outside the white room for himself, but, even on being told he won’t like it, decides to take his own chances and find out for himself what lies beyond. And thus starts one of the most bleak, merciless, tragic, disturbing, frightening and affecting films I have ever seen.

Let’s put the whole Romero aspect thing up front briefly: it’s definitely a Romero film. Some of the music from Dawn of the Dead gets used in one scene. Michael Gornick, the dead Dead director’s usual cinematographer (though not on this gig) appears in a cameo as half of a young couple who visit a psychic to get a reading on their future…and get way more than they bargained for. Interestingly, well, interestingly to me, at least, at one point a few bikers turn up at the amusement park to abuse Maazel, showing that, as an invading force, Hell’s Angels were clearly in Romero’s mind five years before Dawn of the Dead. Romero himself has a cameo in the film, moaning that old people shouldn’t be allowed to drive, and should take the bus. Nod-and-a-wink elements are there for the knowing Romero fan.

Like I said, this is not a horror film, so I am not looking at it from any splatter fan perspective. There is no gore, and the massive, traumatic violence inflicted here is mental and emotional. There may well be Romero fans disappointed with the film, wanting more conventional horror fare from him, and they will be sorely disappointed. But the Lutheran Society certainly knew what they were doing when they hired a 33-year-old Romero to direct, that’s for sure. He certainly didn’t disappoint them. Freak them out and make them lose the film, yes, but not disappoint. And anybody willing to approach the film halfway on its own terms will find it to be a grim, rewarding, absolutely human experience.

I am not going to go too much into what happens in the film. There is no real plot as such, and it has experimental touches to it. Basically what the ‘amusement park’ is is a metaphor for daily existence for the elderly in America and, by extension, the world. And it’s horrifying, brutal, merciless, depressing. And yes, I know I have used those adjectives before, but they’re really all my (un)expressive vocab shrinks down to when I think about the material presented.

The pain and madness and horror is just so unrelenting it’s incredible. Maazel (whose nameless character fits the way we don’t assign old people a name or character or existence in our lives a lot of the time) buys some tickets (sold by a dodgy conman buying valuable heirlooms from confused old people for a fraction of their worth, a cynical wee touch) for the park and steps inside. Instantly the place is a graphic, adrenaline-coursing sped-up whirl of activity for an elderly person, much like real life on any suburban or town street is for somebody slowing down to underground zero in real life.

Children are everywhere laughing and cheering and playing and eating ice cream and riding merry-go-rounds and reminding the elderly of who they – we – once used to be, wondering at the abstract murderous ever-faster ticking of the sullen skeletal hands of time. ‘Rides’ to be experienced include physical therapy and dying and being buried. Every cynical, face-slapping, behind-back-laughing ‘ride’ offered has an exact, precise real-life correlation. It’s not exactly subtle, but as a decently-fitting metaphor it works as well as it has to.

The film is only just under 54 minutes long, and I was thankful for that. I had to turn it off and step away from it a couple of times, finding it deeply painful and overwhelming to watch. And the reason for that was just the pain and horror and indignity heaped upon the poor, sweet old man in his 70s at the centre of the film, whilst gentle folk tunes seditiously whisper on the deceptive soundtrack. Maazel is conned, duped, robbed, beaten. He is unable to carry groceries on his own, and has to leave them. He is kind and shares with others, but his kindness is never reciprocated. Nearly everybody in the film is oblivious to him, except as a problem to be passed onto somebody else, after conning or mocking him. I actually can’t think, right now, of somebody else in cinema who has so much abuse heaped onto their frail, ever-more-slumped shoulders than Maazel does during this film. He never for one second gets “momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh,” to quote William S Burroughs.

In this film, the zombies are the old-age-oblivious young and virile fairground goers, and the elderly, shambling man is the human, beating heart of the film. It’s a neat inversion of Romero’s then-already-established horrific cinematic syntax, and he casts a glaring, angry, cynical, compassionate eye over the nauseating and heartbreaking events from start to finish.

Some of the coldness in the film is so shocking it almost comes across as John Waters bleak black humour, except there is absolutely no humour in this film whatsoever. In one scene, Maazel attends a freakshow. A young woman in a bikini pulls back large curtains…to reveal nothing but normal, confused, elderly people, including a disabled vet in a wheelchair. Maazel then is mistaken for one of the ‘freaks’ and chased along the road. It’s incredibly brutal and cynical, but never without compassion, and moments like that totally work in the overall picture of the Dante’s Inferno of time and slowly dissolving human flesh and the thousand shocks to which tired flesh is sadly heir apparent.

The reason this film, the loneliest film I have ever seen, a ghost film about a living man, got under my slowly-decaying skin, reminding me again of that simple inescapable human life fact, is because I used to be a carer, or caregiver as they are known in America. I have worked with the elderly and disabled and loved doing so. It reminded me of wiping shit from the legs of a man with severe dementia who used to be a top banker. Of wiping blood leaking from the vagina of a woman in her 90s. Of wiping tears and piss and shit in endless loops for those needing it done. Of the frail cries of the vulnerable confused in nursing homes, heedless of their surroundings, crying out for long-dead partners who would never come home again. Of taking old people out for trips to the cinema or a restaurant or a local park or shopping mall, slow leisurely stroll, eyes dimmed by age, little interest in boring consumer trinkets. Of WWII conversations with veterans talking about friends killed. Of suicide attempts. Of uncaring medical authorities with their hands in the pockets of the ailing failing falling rich. Of caregivers good and bad and ugly, unbalanced, racist, hateful of their charges because of skin colour. Of helping a heavy WWII vet back into his wheelchair when he fell on the floor, an epic struggle by myself in his home with the rest of the family gone. Of searching for slow-runaways from ill-equipped nursing homes. Of scum caregivers leaving the disabled in their own bodily fluids on the floor as punishment for wetting the bed. Of being probably the only white Scottish male caregiver in the whole of bloody America. Of the now-clueless elderly who had been astronomers, soldiers, graphic illustrators, now just teeter-tottering slow flesh piles of near-to-the-finish-line nothing at all.

Watching this film was so painful because I could not help the old man in it, and it was unbearable. All the old bad painful memories came flooding back, with no chance to swim in the retro riptides in any reliable or therapeutic way. Anybody who has enjoyed working with the elderly, or who has looked after an elderly friend or family member, can surely relate. The cataract-scarred film vision was so, so unrelentingly cruel and vicious and ugly and inescapable it was nearly impossible to take. I defy anybody with half a heart to watch this film and not be moved. There is a scene where Maazel manages to stagger over to a young lassie of round five, bleeding and beaten, tired, and starts to read from The Three Little Pigs for her. He’s incredibly grateful for this moment of simple human connection in such an unrelievedly heart-murderous landscape. Her mother gathers up the family and they leave, and Maazel just collapses bleeding and weeping on the ground. It was such a heart-rending scene I had to grit my teeth and choke back tears, and it wasn’t the only time that happened. And Maazel’s performance is totally fantastic, engrossing from chirpy start to beaten, world-weary finish. So kudos to Tata Cuda for that. But I sure as Hell can never watch this film again, personally. Way too painful.

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing” – Charles Bukowski.

You know, as a species, the human race isn’t much, really. We’re basically apes with shoes and delusions of grandeur. We treat each other, and ourselves, like total shit. Bottom line, is we really don’t care. I think there is some sort of half-conscious nihilism about being alive and human to us: we know we’re going to die, and so half-heartedly face it, losing ourselves in whatever we can however we can for however long we can get away with it as the crackle of the crematorium flames or the sandy grave-covering earth-pitter-patter grows steadily reaper-scythe-gripping nearer. We do and we don’t give a fuck. And in this modern, disgusting, flashfastforward society, the elderly mean nothing to us, they’re dried-up, used-away old husks to be flushed away into nursing homes, thoughts of their lonely mournful plaintive confused wannabe-go-home wailing driven from our guilty heads by cute cat videos or online superhighway road rage ranting.

Or review rage ranting.

Life and death are inescapable, and we are incapable of getting our heads round either one. Cruelty is a constant, but not a necessity. But we can’t seem to grasp this either.

One of the things I find weird as I get older is having a sense of time, past and present and passing. Watching The Abusement Park, one thing I was acutely aware of, as I watched, was the age and fate of the people in it. The subject matter just made the inescapable fact of this even more inescapable. Watching the kids in the background everywhere, I was extremely conscious of the fact they will now be 48 years older, much older than they were when making a film about the elderly. And as for the pensioners in it, well, of course, they’re all dead, have been for decades; Maazel himself died in 2009, aged 106 years (very) old. Hopefully he lived a decent, relatively painless life until the end. But he’s here in this film, at 70 years old, an incredible 36 years before his own death, warning us from beyond the grave about the way we treat ourselves. And yes, it is treat ourselves, not just treat others, because, as he sagely notes, we too will be old one day, if we’re lucky. 106? Not sure I would want to see the state of world will be in by then.

Guess we’ll see.

Or not.


THE END