Published on June 23rd, 2021 | by Darren Paltrowitz
0A Look At The “Lost” George A. Romero Film “The Amusement Park,” Thanks To AMC’s Shudder
AMC Networks’ Shudder is a premium streaming video service, super-serving members with the best selection in genre entertainment, covering horror, thrillers and the supernatural. Shudder’s expanding library of film, TV series, and originals is available on most streaming devices in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Shudder is offering a free 7-day trial to new users.
To celebrate the premiere of The Amusement Park — George A. Romero’s “lost” and restored film — at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Shudder hosted a live watch followed by a virtual panel on the film and its place within the pioneering independent filmmaker’s influential body of work. For those unable to attend Tribeca, the screening was initially-available to Shudder members via the Shudder TV feed in the U.S. and Canada on June 8, 2021, and has since been made available on-demand to Shudder members worldwide. Following that screening, via Shudder TV and Shudder’s YouTube channel, the panel Reviving Romero’s The Amusement Park aired and featured a conversation between Suzanne Desrocher Romero (founder and president of the George A. Romero Foundation), award-winning horror author and educator Tananarive Due (Horror Noire), author Daniel Kraus (who completed Romero’s posthumous novel The Living Dead), Fangoria editor-in-chief Phil Nobile Jr., and Sandra Schulberg (president and executive director of IndieCollect, which supervised the film’s 4K restoration). The panel was moderated by Shudder curator Samuel Zimmerman.
Recently-discovered and restored 46 years after its completion, The Amusement Park stars Lincoln Maazel as an elderly man who finds himself disoriented and increasingly-isolated as the pains, tragedies and humiliations of aging in America are manifested through roller coasters and chaotic crowds. Commissioned by the Lutheran Society, the film is perhaps George A. Romero’s wildest and most imaginative movie, an allegory about the nightmarish realities of growing older, and is an alluring snapshot of the filmmaker’s early artistic capacity and style and would go on to inform his ensuing filmography. A trailer is below for your viewing pleasure, courtesy of Shudder.
More on The Amusement Park and other must-fee film and television content can be seen here.