The Amusement Park (1975): George A Romero’s lost film comes back from the dead (Blu-Ray Review)

Of course, a man like George A Romero would leave us with one final shock. When he died in 2017, it seemed like his final film was Survival of the Dead, a middling 2009 entry into the zombie genre he redefined with his immortal 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead. But we didn’t reckon with the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania, who hired Romero to make an educational film about elder abuse in 1973. It would be fair to say the result was a bit rawer than they expected. It’s been shown at some film festivals, usually as part of a retrospective on the director’s work, and according to Romero’s widow Suzanne Desrocher-Romero it even got a few screenings at the church that commissioned it. Mostly, though, the film was considered lost until the very last year of Romero’s life, when the Torino Film Festival discovered a 16mm print in their archives. After an extensive restoration, it streamed on Shudder in 2021, and it’s now been released on Blu-Ray as part of Acorn Media’s run of physical releases of Shudder exclusives.

It’s a hell of a story, and there are generous extras here to tell it. The thing that horror fans will be most passionately wishing for – one last encounter with Romero’s uniquely gritty, engaged sensibility – is certainly delivered, but not in the way you might expect. Once you get past the surprise of a Lutheran church working with the director of Dawn of the Dead, the idea of Romero making an educational film about the perils of old age is less surprising than it would be for any other horror director of this era. It’s hard to imagine the young Wes Craven taking time off from Last House on the Left to do something like this, but the message of a movie was always important for Romero. Indeed, if you view The Amusement Park as a PSA first and foremost, it makes a surprising amount of sense. It’s creepy and shocking, but so is Lonely Water, Apaches, or all those other British informational shorts that left such a mark on the psyches of ’70s kids. The occasional apparitions of the grim reaper would fit particularly well into one of those exercises in government-funded grindhouse.

As an educational film, then, it’s less anomalous than it seems. As a George A Romero film, it’s actually more surprising. Certainly, there are things in here that are characteristically Romero. A scene where a young couple at the titular amusement park go to visit a fortune-teller could be pulled straight out of his 1973 masterpiece Season of the Witch, from its psychedelic editing to its collision of the occult with the mundane. The lead character, a disconsolate elderly man lost in a funfair where everyone except him is having fun, is played by Lincoln Maazel, who Romero would re-team with on 1978’s revisionist vampire tale Martin. At one point, Maazel meets a group of bikers, who unfortunately prove to be less noble than the ones led by Ed Harris in 1981’s Knightriders.

There are a lot of George A Romero films that focus on an ordinary person trying to make their way through a desolate nightmare world. Sometimes the world has become nightmarish after an apocalyptic event, sometimes it’s just our world seen from the perspective of the dispossessed. The Amusement Park is something altogether different. After a rather Wellesian introduction from Maazel setting out the film’s educational ambitions, it cuts to a surreal scene in which two different versions of the lead character meet in a blinding white room. This isn’t a kind of horror that Romero usually dabbled in – among that great 1970s generation of horror directors, he was second only to the staunch atheist David Cronenberg in his apparent disinterest in ghostly or spiritual matters. Romero’s films normally ground their stranger and more horrific elements in a recognisable, realistic environment, but in The Amusement Park, the everyday world is the strange, horrific element.

It’s not much like Night of the Living Dead in this regard, but it did keep reminding me of one of the few great landmarks of pre-Romero American independent horror – Carnival of Souls, which the one-and-done genius Herk Harvey made before he went back to making industrial films. Indeed, one of the most rewarding things about The Amusement Park is that it keeps reminding you that Romero was one of the prototypes for the American independent filmmaker. Maazel’s introduction points out that not all of the people in The Amusement Park are actors, and that some are just people drawn from the local community. He says this as if it’s something strange, and perhaps to the Lutherans it was – they probably didn’t see many films by Kenneth Anger or Shirley Clarke. Couldn’t the same be said of any low-budget production, though? The Amusement Park has its flaws: even at 54 minutes it takes a while to get going, and the ending is obvious throughout (although no less devastating for it). But it shows Romero had real hustle, and the fact that it exists at all is such an unexpected treat.

Extras, as noted above, are a cut above the rest of Acorn’s Shudder tie-ins. As well as an interview with Suzanne Desrocher-Romero on the film’s history (including some clips from the negative the Romeros were sent from Torino that really impresses upon you how good the restoration is), there’s a panel discussion featuring Desrocher-Romero, make-up artist Greg Nicotero and more, a commentary by Romero’s friend, collaborator and fellow director Michael Gornick, plus interviews with cast members and even an artist – Ryan Carr – producing a comic book based on The Amusement Park. Short of an archive interview with an affronted Lutheran parishioner, it’s everything you could ever want to know about a film that – just two or three years ago – few of us knew existed.

The Amusement Park is also available to stream on SHUDDER

George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park

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