Festivals - Fantasia 2020 : Class action park will have its International Premiere

By Mulder, 08 august 2020

Imagine this: after a long wait, it is finally your turn to sit on the edge of the slide that will send you into a swimming pool, for your greatest pleasure and fun. But when you are about to launch yourself, you notice something: there is no light in the slide. It is completely dark. As you're being pushed by an underpaid teenager from New Jersey, you realize not only that you have no idea what's going on, but also that this slide is far from comfortable. It hurts you. What was supposed to be fun at first has become terrifying. The twenty or thirty seconds or so that you spend inside the tube are completely creepy, and when you finally get out, it's only to fall into a pool of water whose maintenance seems quite dubious. Finally out of the water and safe on land, you clearly look shaky. Your heart beats faster, you're in shock and you can't believe what just happened. But you decide to get back in line. Welcome to Action Park...

For all the young people who lived in the New York area in the 1980s and 1990s, Action Park was the place to go every summer. It was affordable, crazy, and lived up to its reputation. It was also uncomfortable, hard to get around and, oh yes, it was a dangerous amusement park where the roller coaster was not equipped with seatbelts. All the stories of people breaking their bones after being ejected from the Alpine Slide, bruising themselves while riding down Surf Hill too fast, scraping their skin on the Tarzan Swing and drowning in the Tidal Wave Pool only made the experience even more appealing.

At least until we realized it was all true. Directed by Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott III, Class Action Park finally sheds light on the true and horrible history of this amusement park where the administration was unaware of the dangers, where the staff had fun torturing visitors and where young people returned every summer. The film also deals with the injuries and deaths that took place in the park and which, unfortunately, were far from rare. As the name suggests, Class action park is fun and action-packed, but what makes the film fascinating is the absurdity of the thing. It's how the park administrators got away with such carelessness for so long, and how it has forever affected the lives of many people. It's quite an adventure.

Class Action Park
A film by Seth Porges, Chris Charles Scott...
Produced by Michael Garber, Chris Johnston, Chris Lyon, Seth Porges, Chris Charles Scott
Music: The Holladay Brothers

(Source: Fantasia 2020 Official Site)