[6.1/10] The scariest thing in a George Romero movie is rarely the monster. It’s usually the truth behind it. Zombies or crazies or possessed monkeys may be the catalyst. But the part of his films that stays with you is the prejudice, the cravenness, the inhumanity that’s spawned in the shadow of those creatures. Romero understood that, cultivated it throughout his work, and it’s why so many of his movies remain so chilling today.

In that spirit, *The Amusement Park* may be Romero’s most frightening film because it’s made of nothing but truth. If we are fortunate enough, each of us will grow old. We will slow down. We will find ourselves in a world that may accommodate us, but is no longer built for us. This lost feature isn’t subtle in how it communicates the quiet horror of that, and the implications for aging in a society that doesn’t value the elderly. But it is as firmly rooted in the realness of that horror as anything Romero’s released.

Unfortunately, the directness of it gets tiresome in places. *The Amusement Park* is bookended by the lead actor talking directly about the film’s message against ageism. The meat of the piece is a raft of blunt metaphors or vignettes about the challenges seniors faced in the modern world circa 1973 (when the movie was made). There is no subtlety here, as Romero and company depict the hardships of the elderly in overexaggerated terms for emphasis. The length and volume of it grows tedious quickly.

And yet, a few things bolster the film. One is the surrealness of the piece. The premise of *The Amusement Park* is to reimagine the obstacles of aging as events in a deranged theme park. At times, these incidents play like My First Art Film:tm:, with a cartoonish interlude about classism where a fatcat holds a giant cigar, or our perspective character goes to see a Freak Show where it turns out the “freaks” are just regular old people. It’s one of those “makes a powerful statement about something” bits where the unreality of the setup is supposed to occlude the obviousness of the point.

Despite that, the stated goal of the film is to make the viewer *feel* what it’s like to be in the shoes of an older person experiencing those hardships, and the surreal approach helps. Romero and his team feature odd angles, quick cuts, bizarre images. The effect is disorienting and sometimes even disturbing. At times, the cartooniness of the presentation can be distracting. But in others, it helps to put you in the same mental space the protagonist is: bewildered, beleaguered, and distraught at all of this.

He is the film’s other main strength. Lincoln Maazel carries the movie, our guide and avatar through the world of the titular park. He has minimal dialogue, and so has to convey everything in his expressions and body language. His increasingly frazzled reactions to the inequities and indignities he and those like him are subject to, the gradual degradation of his mood and well-being, all succeed much better than the oft-corny attempts to dramatize the hurdles senior citizens face. His emotional reaction sells these harrowing events, and his journey and hard-suffered epiphanies are a microcosm of the viewer’s. When he breaks down crying in particular, it adds the weight of genuine emotion to otherwise loony events and grounds them in something human.
Occasionally, the “attractions” in the park manage to do the same. At around the halfway mark of *The Amusement Park*, a young couple ask a fortune teller to show them their future. The scene that results presages *Requiem for a Dream*, with a poor older woman in a spartan apartment, losing her husband to illness, snubbed by her doctor, and finding no help from her fellow man. In contrast to the heightened metaphors of the scenes set in the park itself, this vignette is choppy enough in the editing to maintain the liminal feel of the piece, while scanning as a believable enough situation to feel closer to reality than its companions. It’s a striking set piece, and unmoors you in a way not every sequence here does.

Some others are up to the challenge. Even when the loudness of the point is too much in scenes about finances, transportation, or medical care, the film seizes on some elemental ideas at the heart of the scenarios. Even if the finer points of its funhouse mirror comparisons to real life problems fall flat, the relatable sense of alienation, loneliness, rejection, invisibility, disability, and compartmentalization all come through with more than a little bite to them. In some stretches, you just want to yell “Hooray for metaphors!” at the screen, but in others, you cannot help but be moved or disturbed by the images and emotions presented.

The deftest choice of the film is its circularity. When it begins, a pristine version of our protagonist talks to a disheveled, bloody version of himself in a white room, asking his counterpart if he wants to go outside and see the world. In the early part of the film, you’re in the clean man’s shoes, wanting to venture to the other side of the door and curious to know what lies beyond it. By the end, when the clean man becomes the battered man and returns to the same room, you share the sentiments he expressed at the beginning of the film, having seen what he’s been through and understanding why he’s loath to go back out to the “nothing” that awaits. It’s a neat trick, one that shouldn’t work as well as it does, but thrives on the film’s central performance and the film’s commitment to situating the audience as close to the protagonist’s perspective as possible.

Despite those commendable elements, *The Amusement Park* is not Romero’s masterwork. It’s too cheesy, too overstretched, too ham-handed for that. But at the same time, it grabs onto a nerve and never let’s go. There is a terrifying truth at the heart of the film, not only in its sobering view of the sorts of difficulties most, if not all of us will face if we’re lucky enough to reach advanced age, but also in the reprehensible ways in which our society treats the least of us, both then and now. As hokey as the approach is at times, there remains that kernel of the real beneath George Romero’s lost work, and its sting lingers long after the hokum has faded.