Last month, George A. Romero's widow Suzanne Desrocher-Romero revealed that one of the things Romero left behind when he passed away last year was a little-seen film that he had made in 1973, something described as being
a scary movie, but it's not a horror movie, and it's about ageism."
This came as quite a surprise to many of us, and we were left wondering just what this lost film was… Even though the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn had hosted a screening of this film back in March of this year. That one somehow slipped past many of us.
As it turns out, the mysterious film is titled THE AMUSEMENT PARK, and it stars Lincoln Maazel of Romero's MARTIN as
an elderly gentlemen sets out for what he thinks will be a normal day at an amusement park and is soon embroiled in a waking nightmare the likes of which you've never seen!
There's some confusion over whether the film's running time is 60 minutes or closer to 25, but we do know that it was meant to be a television PSA about elder abuse that Romero was commissioned to make by a religious group. When the group saw how strange and disturbing the finished film was, they decided to shelve it rather than release it.
Author Daniel Kraus, who has written the THE SHAPE OF WATER and TROLLHUNTERS novels with Guillermo Del Toro and is working on finishing Romero's novel THE LIVING DEAD, recent got the chance to watch THE AMUSEMENT PARK and wrote about the film on Twitter, as you can see in this thread of tweets:
Like Kraus said, the George A. Romero Foundation is currently raising funds to restore THE AMUSEMENT PARK, so fans who would like to see this lost work of Romero's finally get some kind of release might want to head over to the donation page.
Romero is one of my favorite filmmakers, my #1 favorite of the directors who are commonly referred to as "masters of horror", so I would love to see this long-lost and forgotten film get some kind of distribution 45 years after it was made.