I grew up in New Jersey, but I never went to Action Park. To be fair and accurate, it wasn’t located near my part of New Jersey, and for my siblings and I growing up, the furthest we went from home for amusement park rides of any kind was Six Flags Great Adventure, and that wasn’t very often, or the ride piers in the Jersey shore town we vacationed in every year. Besides, Action Park was a water park, and I still don’t know how to swim. So, for me, HBO Max’s new documentary Class Action Park was unlikely to gain any nostalgic interest from me.
But many of my college friends did go there. Heck, some of them might have even worked there. I saw a lot of interest on Facebook from those folks, and one or two of them may have claimed to have been among the injured at the park. It was a big thing in New Jersey for the 80s, so let’s see what I missed.
Class Action Park, both the title of the documentary and one of the various nicknames for the park itself, sets out at first as a somewhat humorous story about a freewheeling waterpark set up in Vernon, New Jersey. Originally set up by onetime pennystock dealer Gene Mulvihill, the place had a well-earned reputation for rides and slides that were, in a word, dangerous. Safety was a minor concern for the man the teenage employees called Uncle Gene, a man who wore a suit everywhere, took ride ideas from more or less anyone who had one, and wouldn’t settle a lawsuit so much as force the trial to go as long as possible until the other party ran out of money and quit.
It did not help that Mulvilhill’s hiring practices were to essentially hire any teenager who showed up looking for a job, regardless of legal qualifications or experience. Patrons chided each other to do risky rides, and it wasn’t uncommon for the ride supervisors (who were, again, mostly teenagers) to use their time on the job to experiment with sex and/or drugs. And at the center of it all was Uncle Gene, a man who was friends with future president Donald Trump, and the park was, we’re told, an investment even Trump thought was too risky or crazy to put money into.
That sort of freewheeling, spit-in-the-eye-of-authority attitude reigns for much of Class Action Park, but for a park this dangerous and this well known as dangerous, it only makes sense that the documentary would also focus on the injuries and deaths patrons sustained, and that final section of the documentary changes the mood rather significantly. True, the filmmakers do gradually come to that topic. It would be a bit jarring otherwise, but the story the filmmakers began is not the one they end on, and sadly, the earlier tone doesn’t help get to that point, especially since the earlier tone is rather compelling work. Ultimately, while Class Action Park does have something to say about irresponsible theme park management, I did end the film wondering if the lighthearted tone of the first part of the documentary was entirely appropriate given how the film ended on a much more sobering note.
Grade: B
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