The Amusement Park (1975) Review

The Amusement Park is a short lost film by the late, great George A. Romero, which was finally released on Shudder in 2021, after presumably being lost in someone’s shoe closet for half a century. The story follows an elderly man (played by Lincoln Maazel, who’d later appear in Martin) as he wanders into an amusement park that quickly reveals itself to be less Alton Towers and more Dante’s Inferno.

We open with Lincoln Maazel – elderly, frail, and dressed in a white suit that makes him looks like Colonel Sanders‘ less dandy brother – sitting in a sterile white room. He looks wrecked, bruised, and exhausted, like he just received the ol’ ‘minimum wage care home worker is done with your shit’ treatment. A kindly man asks if he wants to go outside, to the amusement park. Maazel says no, “You won’t like it out there.” Of course, we smash cut to…

Maazel steps into what at first looks like a sunny day at a carnival. Tickets, rides, popcorn, bumper cars – fun for the whole family! Except every attraction is a thinly veiled metaphor for the thousand humiliations of aging, and the “fun” quickly curdles into a surreal endurance test. Our poor protagonist finds himself ignored, mocked, swindled, beaten, run over, and finally chewed up and spit out by the gleefully indifferent machine of society.

Even when he tries to connect with others, he might as well be a ghost rattling chains nobody can hear. The younger crowd treats him less like a person and more like an inconvenient speed bump on their way to the rollercoaster. And there’s a hospital tent that’s basically a triage unit for discarded seniors – patients lined up, staff disinterested, medical care offered like a sideshow attraction nobody paid for.

By the time we loop back to the white room from the beginning, Maazel is a broken man. The film closes with him slumped and bloodied, warning the next guy who wanders in not to go outside, not to bother with the park. But of course, the loop resets. It always resets.

The Amusement Park might be Romero at his most pure. No zombies, no gore, no frills. Just Romero holding a mirror to an ugly social truth.It’s not horror in the jump-scare, monster-in-the-closet sense. But Romero weaponizes disorientation like few directors could. The oppressive soundscape, the shrill carnival chaos, and the way extras lurch into the frame like they were told “pretend you’ve just escaped the asylum” gives the film an unshakable fever-dream quality. Its trim 54 minutes feel like an eternity.

The real kicker? The film was commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania as an educational piece about elder abuse. What they got was Romero doing Romero: a merciless, unblinking nightmare that makes Night of the Living Dead look like an after-school special. Unsurprisingly, the church folk took one look at the finished film and went, “Oh no, no, no – bury it.” And bury it they did, for decades. Which is fair. Hiring George Romero to do your tender PSA on elder care is like having Francis Bacon paint your portrait and being upset that you look like a nightmare.