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Jettison Yourself Back Into Action Park With New Documentary
By
Claire Lampen
Published Sep 24, 2019
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By
Claire Lampen
Published Sep 24, 2019
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Over two decades have passed since New Jersey's most deranged amusement park locked its gates, and presumably, your skinned limbs have scabbed over — your broken bones, fused back together; your mangled teeth, replaced with convincing replicas — during the intervening years. Time has healed all your wounds, and now you are ready to revisit the scene of the crime: Action Park, a lawless attraction famed for its ability to absolutely wreck visitors, and also the subject of a new documentary.
In Class Action Park, Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges (who released a short on Action Park in 2013) take you back to the storied "chaos water park," as it is described in a trailer voiceover. "Very little oversight, too much alcohol, whistles blowing, people screaming, motors running — it was an energy," the voiceover continues. "You knew you were jumping into the fire pit."
Perhaps literally, because on at least one occasion, one of the park's features supposedly involved flaming tennis balls launched at smallish, potentially human-operated (see this footage, around the four-minute mark) tanks. Regular!
If Action Park lived and died before you were even born, or if you did not reside in the tri-state area during its reign of terror, a brief biography: CEO and Fearless Leader Gene Mulvihill approached Action Park's design with an unusually laissez-faire attitude, and when he opened it for business in 1978, aimed to place customers in the driver's seat. Mulvihill, according to History, imagined "a park where patrons managed the rides — including how fast and how high they went."
A dangerous proposition, even before you consider that a drunken teenage staff reportedly ran the show, reworking rides for maximum risk. There was the Alpine Slide, a cement-and-fiberglass chute accessible by ski lift, which claimed at least one life. Visitors would rocket down the track in open carts that hugged the track; according to History, many of the Alpine Slide's safety issues stemmed from these sleds:
In theory, each rider was in charge of their own speed, but the devices were almost always broken. Some had no brakes, which meant there was no slowing down as they would zoom down the concrete slide. Others had the brakes locked on, causing the rider to crawl down the slide, inevitably being hit in the back by another, speedier, rider.
There were long tube slides that lacked the requisite water flow to actually shoot riders into the frigid water below, reportedly leaving some visitors lodged in the middle of a long, dark tunnel; there was a freshwater Tidal Wave Pool (a.k.a. the "Grave Pool"), where enormous, overpowering swells required lifeguards to rescue an average of 12 people per day, according to History.
And then there was the Cannonball Loop, a water slide that looked like a long reptilian tongue, curling a caught fly back into some titanic chameleon mouth. Skip ahead to the 8:17 mark, and you can see people riding this ride successfully:
According to the Class Action Park trailer, however, not all Cannonball Loop experiences were so seamless. "The first couple people" to exit the 360-degree loop "came out and their mouths were all bloody," we're told in the documentary trailer. "Then they sent another couple people down, and they came down with lacerations. Then they took the tube apart, and they found teeth stuck in the padding, from the first few people. And these other people were just going up and ripping into it."
That makes sense, if you take a moment to consider the half-baked physics on this one. Action Park lore holds that a test dummy lost its head in the loop, and one former park employee told WeirdNJ.com: "The Cannonball Loop was the brainchild of some Swiss guy they imported on a week-long visa. I was one of the idiots that accepted you-know-who’s crisp $100 bill to test run it. That was my last ride. $100 did not buy enough booze to drown out that memory."
All of which explains why the Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety reportedly shut down the Cannonball Loop after just one month of operations.
Anyway, at least six people died at Action Park by the time it closed in 1996. A sanitized, slowed-down park — the Mountain Creek Waterpark — reopened in its place, but obviously, this was simply not the same. The original was reportedly so deranged that, when he once considered buying the property, Donald Trump ultimately deemed the premise "too unhinged."
So! Can't wait to live/relive it all on the big screen. According to the website, Class Action Park is "coming soon" — here's you waiting on the Cannonball line for the foreseeable:
Correction: A company called Intrawest bought Action Park and reopened it as Mountain Creek Waterpark in 1998. The Mulvihills bought back the park in 2010, keeping the Mountain Creek name except for a brief interlude in 2014, when they temporarily revived the Action Park moniker.
Tagged
documentary
movie
action park
Claire Lampen
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