Class Action Park Will Make You Wonder How Any Teenager Survived the '80s

Growing up, my family lived equidistant from two amusement parks. One, Darien Lake, was big and fancy and got the huge rollercoasters and eventually became a Six Flags. The other, Fantasy Island, was a more budget affair, so we went to that one a lot, and the most notorious ride at that humble theme park was called the Devil's Hole. Essentially a human-sized centrifuge, the Devil's Hole had riders stand up with their backs to the wall in a circular chamber, then spun incredibly fast until the g-forces pinned you to the wall, then the floor dropped out, so you were pinned to the wall with nothing else holding you up but physics. I never went on it, of course, but the stories about it were legend. If anyone puked, the older, braver kids said, it would swirl, suspended in air, until it splattered on a defenseless rider. And there were of course the rumors that a kid died in the Devil's Hole once. That the ride was indoors, and thus not observable by anyone who wasn't riding, only added to the mystique.

I imagine every town in America has a theme park with similar urban legends, and growing up in the '80s, without any kind of information source to debunk anything, these tales ran rampant. What's fascinating about Action Park, the rural New Jersey water park at the center of the HBO Max documentary Class Action Park, is that not only were the horror stories about injuries and deaths on their wildly dangerous rides completely true, but that pretty much all archival footage of the park makes this immediately obvious. The history of Action Park — a uniquely 1980s tale of hubris, danger, unsupervised teens, parochial New Jersey braggadocio, unsafe conditions, hyper-local nostalgia, and ultimately, deep and tragic loss — is one told in the disbelieving tone of anyone who survived it, with the occasional reminder that not everybody did.

The story of Action Park, as told in the film, is one of those "only in the 1980s" stories, sitting at the intersection of the political, social, and cultural vibe of the time. Reagan-era politics, lax regulations on just about everything, and lawlessness on Wall Street may not have created the huckster behind Action Park, Gene Mulvhill, but they certainly allowed him to flourish. The film ties Mulvhill to a number of trends in the '80s, with clips of Donald Trump and The Wolf of Wall Street to help us orient him in our cultural memory. Mulvhill took an old ski resort in Vernon, New Jersey, and turned it into Action Park, a summertime water park destination where "people controlled the action." What that amounted to was a series of rides and attractions that weren't just merely indifferent to safety concerns but actually seemed to take pride in the danger of it all. Which probably wasn't a bad bet to take if you wanted to stake out a reputation among the latchkey New Jersey teens of the 1980s. At one point, the combination of dangerous rides and rowdy teenage riders at the park is described as "something between Ayn Rand and Lord of the Flies," and that's not at all far off.

Even for someone who grew up in the '80s, there's a degree of incredulousness to watching Class Action Park. You just can't believe this kind of thing was allowed to happen, even if you have memories of the laissez-faire attitude of the time period. But it's right there in all of its home-video glory: water slides designed for (literal) breakneck speed that send riders armed with merely a thin foam mat through a suicide loop before depositing their scraped, often broken bodies out the other side; rope-swing dives into freezing cold water, where teens would be more concerned with flashing each other and hurling slurs at anyone hesitating to take the plunge, than worrying about knocking the hell out of each other; go-kart slaloms down concrete tubes at terrifying speeds; and a wave pool that will give you a panic attack just watching it.

Besides the archival footage, the best thing about Class Action Park is the tone that almost every interview subject takes in remembering what went on there. From former park employees to former guests and survivors, nearly everyone speaks about the rides with a mixture of awe, regret, and the kind of hysterical gallows humor of someone who just sprinted past a graveyard at midnight. Almost all the former employees seem shocked that things didn't go even worse, as they recount story after story about near-misses, kids getting hurt, 14-year-olds supervising rides, and drunk, rowdy New Jersey park-goers acting pretty much as you'd expect them to. These are stories that end in assurances that the park guest in question "went on to live a normal life"

The best anecdotes come from comedian Chris Gethard, a frequent visitor to Action Park, whose memories of the park are delivered with wide-eyed amazement that anyone survived, mixed with a kind of pride familiar to any '80s kid who ever walked over train tracks or popped off illegal fireworks or indulged in any number of the deeply unsafe things unsupervised teens did back then. Gethard's observations of not only Action Park but the general recreational options for kids at that time are so sharp and funny ("Kids would try to die for fun — I've been in at least six abandoned mental hospitals for fun") that you often wish you could just watch him riff on the subject for 90 minutes and that would be your movie.

Which isn't to say that Class Action Park doesn't tell a compelling story of its own. Gene Mulvhill himself is a classic American huckster, and the stories about him — and of the house of cards he built — put him in the same class of fraudsters as the folks behind Fyre Festival or Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos (both get explicitly name-checked in relation to Gene in the film). And while nothing in Class Action Park is quite on the level of Tiger King', there are moments that summon the same feeling of disbelief that people like this exist in the world. The stories about Gene paying employees $100 to serve as human testers of suicide slides, or faking a cattle-prod attack to warn off unpaid park guests are the stuff of urban legends, but the film doesn't stop at just silly anecdotes. Mulvhill's long history of fraud, criminality, and possible mob ties paint the portrait of a true villain.

The film does an excellent job at communicating the vibe of the park in all its boastful teenage lawlessness. Archival footage of MTV's Headbangers Ball doing a remote setup at the park speaks volumes about the rebellious cachet attached to Action Park. (If the sight of Rikki Rachtman interviewing the members of Alice in Chains in front of a water-slide loop doesn't transport you back to 1987, nothing else will.) It's Adventureland but meaner. It's Stand By Me with aimless aggression.

Deftly, the film pivots in its final third to telling the darkest side of Action Park's story: the six deaths that occurred there in its 18 years in business. While there is certainly a level of hysterical incredulity and some gallows humor to be found in the carnage ("No one should ever be the second person to die in a wave pool," Gethard cracks at one point), interviews with the mother and brother of a kid who was thrown from the go-kart luge onto nearby rocks and died of brain injury are as devastating as you might expect. It's an incredibly tough balance to strike in a film narrated for maximum archness by John Hodgman, but directors Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott III largely pull it off.

The story of Action Park is undoubtedly a tragedy. But it's a tragedy that exists in the lives and memories of the people who experienced the park as a spiky fact of life. Whether or not it's worth it to wear the scars and near-misses of Action Park as a badge of honor for '80s kids in the greater New Jersey area, Class Action Park successfully makes the case that surviving a day at the water slides was the unlikeliest outcome of all.

Class Action Park drops on HBO Max Thursday August 27th.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.