Fantasia Film Festival Review: ‘Class Action Park’

Review by James Lindorf

For the past 23 years, the Fantasia International Film Festival has taken place in the heart of beautiful Montreal, the largest city in Canada’s Québec province. Fantasia, like many big-name festivals, SWSX, TIFF, and Tribeca, to name a few, will be hosting a virtual version of their festival this year. Fantasia’s 24th installment occurs on August 20th – September 2nd and will include both Live and On-Demand Screenings, live Q&As, and special events, like John Carpenter becoming Fantasia’s first recipient of their virtual Cheval Noir award. The process to purchase tickets can be found on their website. Some conversations and events can be seen on the Fantasia YouTube channel.

Directors Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott chronicle the rise and collapse of Action Park, Vernon New Jersey’s most notorious water park in “Class Action Park.” The park that would go one to be known as “Traction Park,” “Accident Park,” and “Class Action Park” was opened by disgraced Wallstreet mogul Eugene “Gene” Mulvihill in 1978. Gene was known to take short cuts and risks if it meant increased profits, and after accusations of securities fraud forced him to seek greener pastures. He found them about 40 miles from New York City in Vernon, New Jersey, the future home of Action Park. Gene brought his trademark risky behavior to the park and stopped playing with people’s wallets and started playing with their lives.

The rides at Action Park were designed with a blatant disregard for safety, physics, or engineering standards. Their main goal when designing a ride was how to make it more exciting. These rides would lead to pure adrenaline-fueled joy when things went right. However, when they went wrong, they took out teeth, dislocated shoulders, gashed foreheads, and left friction burns all along arms and legs. More importantly, people died. Three drowned in the wave pool. One was thrown from a ride onto rocks the park had been told to remove. Another was electrocuted after falling into water near submerged machinery. After putting too much strain on the local emergency services, the park had to buy its own ambulances to transport injured park goers.

“Class Action Park” does get a bit repetitive as they move from ride to ride to discuss how it was built and what made it so dangerous. They try and break it up with stories from the park’s employees about wild parties and guests. Despite its story lacking a lot of variety “Class Action Park” is often jaw-droppingly shocking and laugh out loud funny.