‘People Were Bleeding All Over’: America’s Most
Dangerous Amusement Park
Action Park was infamous for bruises, scars, broken
bones — even death. Now it is the subject of a documentary.
James
Barron
By James
Barron
Oct. 19,
2019
Amusement
parks are designed to deliver thrills. They are places for splashing and
screaming and laughing, often on rides that defy common sense, not to mention
the laws of physics.
But a park
in New Jersey routinely delivered a lot worse — bloody noses, bruises, broken
teeth and bones, concussions and even death. People who spent a day at Action
Park in its prime, in the 1980s and 1990s, often left with something to show
for it: scars.
“People
were bleeding all over the place,” said Susie McKeown, who is now 52 and
remembers going to Action Park after she graduated from high school more than
30 years ago. “People were walking around the park with scraped elbows or
knees.’’
She went
home with her own badge of honor, having broken one of her front teeth on a
ride that ended with a 15- or 20-foot plunge into a chilly pond. “You went so
fast that if your chin hit the water at the wrong angle, you chipped your
teeth,” she said.
She is
hardly alone, as far as injuries go — or memories. Sports Illustrated recently
published a 3,300-word article under the headline, “Remembering Action Park,
America’s Most Dangerous, Daring Water Park.”
And in
2014, Cory Booker, a United States senator from New Jersey and a Democratic
presidential candidate, wrote on Twitter, “I’ve got stories 2 tell.”
Now a
documentary is on the way. Its title is “Class Action Park,” a reference to one
of the many nicknames for Action Park. The park, about 50 miles northwest of
New York City in Vernon, N.J., was long ago replaced by a far tamer
destination, with different owners and a new name, Mountain Creek Water Park.
Action Park
“was funny, it was weird, it was hysterical, but there was a darkness to it,”
said Seth Porges, who made the documentary with Chris Charles Scott.
“People got
hurt there. The hardest part of making this movie was: How do you portray that?
A lot of people look back fondly on it as a coming-of-age experience. How do
you reconcile the fun of it with the human toll?”
Mr.
Porges’s parents put Action Park on their vacation itinerary when he was a
teenager growing up in Bethesda, Md. “I have these memories of impossible
machines, water slides that seemed like they came from a Looney Tunes cartoon
and this crazed atmosphere of chaos,” he said.
He also
remembers the way Action Park promoted itself in the 80s and 90s. “The ads
portrayed the place as a family-friendly, wholesome, great place to bring your
kids,” he said. “You’d get there and realize the reality of the situation was
anything but.”
The website
WeirdNJ said two of the touchstones of growing up in New Jersey were being able
to name all the places in the opening montage of “The Sopranos” and being
seriously injured at Action Park. At least 14 broken bones and 26 head injuries
were reported in 1984 and 1985. Action Park eventually bought the town new
ambulances to handle trips to hospitals.
“Even the
Action Park employees jokingly refer to the place as ‘Traction Park,’” as in
broken bones, The New York Times said in 1983.
But there
were deaths at Action Park: six between 1978, when it opened, and 1996, when it
closed. (It reopened under different owners a few years later, only to close
and reopen again.) Two deaths occurred within a single week in 1982. One victim
was a 15-year-old boy who drowned in the notorious Tidal Wave Pool. The other
was a 27-year-old man who was electrocuted on a ride called Kayak Experience.
“There was
virtually no action taken against” Action Park, said Mr. Porges, the filmmaker.
“Eventually it shut down, not because of some regulator who said ‘You’re
through.’ But because it went bankrupt.” (The state Labor Department found no
violations in the kayak case, but said that electric current from an underwater
fan could have caused serious bodily injury.)
Mr. Porges,
a former editor at Maxim and Popular Mechanics magazines who has a degree in
journalism, saw Action Park as a good story. “I’m a journalist by trade,” he
said. “I realized this is a great opportunity to apply my trade, so we began to
dig. The true story of Action Park — it’s weirder and crazier than the legend.”
But it is
the nostalgia-tinted legend that remains in people’s memories. Alison Becker,
42, an actress and writer best known for a recurring role on the sitcom “Parks
and Recreation,” said the risks at Action Park were part of the appeal. She
said she had gone to Six Flags Great Adventure, which is also in New Jersey,
and nothing equaled the fear factor at Action Park.
“You know
the scene in ‘Footloose’ where they’re playing a game of chicken with tractors
and going at each other?” said Ms. Becker, who grew up about 30 miles from
Action Park in Allamuchy Township. “Most people look at that and say, ‘What
dumb kids.’ I look at it and say, ‘That’s like a day at Action Park. They
could’ve charged an extra five for that, and we would have paid it.”
Action Park
was so notorious that there are stories about a test dummy that was sent
through a ride before it opened. The dummy came out missing something — its
head, in some versions; a leg or an arm in others.
Andy
Mulvihill, 56, the son of Action Park’s longtime owner, said the tale about the
dummy’s head was true. He said he knows this because he was there. He was the
first person to go on that ride, he said, after the dummy came out decapitated.
“I was
wearing my hockey equipment when I did it,” he said. Speed was essential. “If
you didn’t have enough speed,” Mr. Mulvihill said, “you’d fall and smash your
face, and if you smashed hard enough, you could break your nose or knock out
some teeth.”
He said
that ride was open for only a few weeks at a time. “Generally, the rides were
very tame,” he said. “But there were some where you controlled the speed and
the action, and if you were reckless, you could get hurt.”
Action Park
was created by Andy Mulvihill’s father Eugene, whom Mr. Porges described as a
“showman-huckster businessman, a mixture of P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney, with a
little bit of Trump.”
Andy
Mulvihill said “the intent certainly was not to make it dangerous.”
He also
said the deaths did not deter his father, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges
related to insurance policies in 1984 and whom the Securities and Exchange
Commission banned from the securities business in 1986.
“He didn’t
build Action Park just to make money,” Mr. Porges said.
Nor did he
“build Action Park just to break rules,” he said. “He really wanted to create
an incredibly fun place. He had a vision for the most fun place in the world,
unhindered by common sense or safety. A lot of people romanticize it about him
and the park. They say there are too many rules now, too much regulation, stuff
used to be fun. Yeah, stuff used to be fun — if you survived.”
Andy
Mulvihill called the deaths at Action Park “devastating to me.”
But he added,
“three of those deaths were drownings. We pulled out thousands and thousands of
people who were people who had no business in the water.’’
And yet, it
was exhilarating. For some, the conversation in the car on the way there “was
about who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that, who do you think is going
to get hurt,” recalled Kris Brennan, who is now 45 and lives in Westfield. “It
wasn’t ‘If someone gets hurt,’ it was ‘Who’s going to get hurt?’”
Mr. Brennan
had “a chunk of skin taken out of my hip” on the 2,700-foot-long Alpine Slide.
“Class
Action Park” will probably bring on a flood of memories. But Andy Mulvihill is
looking to tell the story his way, and next summer Penguin Books will publish
“Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides and the Untold Story of America’s Most
Dangerous Amusement Park.”
He said it
was “nonfiction for sure,” even if it read like fiction.
“When you
do something as crazy, as cutting-edge” as Action Park, he said, “and you put
it in the metro New York area, where New Yorkers are pretty much crazy anyway,
you have stories.”
James
Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist. He is the author of the books “Piano:
The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand” and “The One-Cent Magenta” and the
editor of “The New York Times Book of New York.” More about James Barron
‘Class Action Park’ Review: Thanks for the Injuries
The HBO Max documentary details the joys and horrors
of New Jersey’s Action Park, a no-rules bacchanal of water slides and broken
bones.
By Jason
Bailey
Sept. 1,
2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/movies/class-action-park-review.html
For New
Jersey youth in the ’70s and ’80s, visiting (and surviving) Action Park was a
rite of passage. The sprawling combination of water park, motor park and
general bacchanal was the brainchild of Gene Mulvihill, a disgraced former
penny-stock pusher who counted the cash as his park became a rule-free stew of
dangerous rides, teen guests, teen employees, raging hormones, ’80s-style
machismo and booze.
The HBO Max
original documentary “Class Action Park” (one of the park’s winking nicknames;
Traction Park was another) attempts a tricky balancing act, reveling in the
hedonism of the attraction while treating the consequences of that hedonism
with appropriate gravitas. The directors Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges
sneak the viewer behind the turnstiles by deploying John Hodgman’s wry
narration, giddily kitschy archival materials and interviews with park
employees, celebrity patrons and journalists. Scott and Porges spend a fair
amount of their running time on a detailed walk-through of the rides (many of
them designed by “people on the fringes” of the industry) and their various corresponding
dangers and injuries — as well as the shamelessly shady business practices of
its owner.
The
grimness begins to creep in around the hour mark, as cheerful injuries and
“battle scars” give way to horrifying stories of electrocution and drowning, as
well as details behind the park’s first death, the 19-year-old George Larsson
Jr., complete with wrenching testimonials by his surviving family. Shockingly,
there were five more deaths in the next seven years; the filmmakers detail how
Mulvihill used his increasing power, influence and checkbook to dodge
responsibility for them.
“Class
Action Park” loses its footing somewhat in the closing passages; Scott and
Porges don’t seem to know quite how to wrap things up, and the film’s big tonal
shift is a turning point that is all but impossible to come back from. (The
incongruent feel-good vibe of the Holladay Brothers’ score does more harm than
good.) But that shift is effective, and necessary, slyly replicating the
experience of visiting Action Park itself: it’s all fun and games until someone
gets hurt.
Class Action Park
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