HBO Max doc is what Action Park deserves

Class Action Park is the documentary that New Jersey’s infamous, deadly, and long-since-closed water park deserves.

The bulk of the 90-minute journey focuses on the attractions themselves, an unruly collection of poorly designed and questionably tested creations that, over the years, claimed a handful of lives and caused exponentially more injuries. With minutes devoted to examining each one, you come away with an understanding of the park without ever having visited.

The deep-dive is ushered along by a lineup of Gen Xers who speak with a mix of unrestrained horror and glee about the nightmares they witnessed visiting the park as kids. We also hear from former Action Park employees, who offer much more straight-faced accounts their time at the park – though you get the feeling that they’re all cackling between takes.

We should pause for a minute and talk about what this place actually was. Action Park was the creation of the late Gene Mulvihill, who came up with the water park as a way to squeeze non-winter revenue out of a ski area in Vernon, New Jersey.  

As the documentary reveals, Mulvihill was a colorful, loud personality who was big on ideas but short on follow-through. That caustic combination is what led to Action Park, a place defined by its cut corners and party vibes. The dangerous reputation was part of the allure for visitors in the ’80s and ’90s. At least until it wasn’t.

The documentary’s looks at each attraction cover every facet of their existence: their creation, what it was like to experience them, the injuries they caused, and, when it applies, their eventual closure. The small details that emerge in these moments are frequently shocking.

We learn, for example, that park employees tested the unfinished Cannonball Loop – a water slide that ends in a full-blown upside-down loop – after Mulvihill offered anyone who dared to try it $100. We also learn that many of the later testers emerged from the slide bearing bloody gashes. The cause? Human teeth stuck to the slide’s interior walls that were left behind by previous testers. 

What’s amazing as you wade through this growing picture of a real life horrorshow is how the account comes across riveting, rather than repulsive. Some of that has to do with the presentation: Instead of serving up piles of bloody archival footage, we get simple, colorful animated sequences that illustrate the dangers without turning your stomach.

But really, it’s the talking heads. Frequent appearances from the likes Chris Gethard, Alison Becker, Seth Porges, and others keep the tone light and snarky in the midst of all the truly horrific details. The tone of their talk gives the documentary a distinctly comic rhythm, with interjections from former employees doing the work of a traditional straight man.

It only starts to go off the rails in the last half-hour or so, when Class Action Park shifts gears to more fully center the human cost of Mulvihill’s reckless efforts. At this point, the tone changes to something a little more serious as we sit down with family members of one of the people who died in an Action Park attraction.

Watching this documentary can be triggering for people who visited Action Park.

The segment is clearly meant to serve as a sort of mea culpa for approaching the rest of the water park’s story with such a light treatment. But it ends up feeling disingenuous as the documentary moves to dial in the focus on one particular death that we eventually realize was covered with a much different tone at an earlier point in the movie.

The dissonance between those two sections doesn’t do great things for the flow of the story, but it’s also somewhat fitting given the subject of this documentary. The duality of Action Park is the whole reason why it stuck around into the mid-’90s, and the movie hammers that point home again and again, right through the final frames.

I should warn anyone who visited the park personally: Watching this can be triggering, and I’m not being glib. I went there with my sleepaway camp for multiple consecutive summers in the early ’90s, and the act of watching the movie brought a flood of memories rushing back.

I remembered, for example, that on the way in we campers were handed a list of slides and other attractions that were simply off-limits – and it wasn’t a short list. I also remembered the unique experience of walking around the largely concrete-and-asphalt park with no flip-flops, which the documentary actually gets into. For me, it became a game of racing from one shady patch to another.

Most of all, though, watching the documentary let loose a gush of visual memories. Bloody, oozing friction burns splashed across the backs of people who braved the deadly Alpine Slide. The flash of bubbles as a strong current pulled me underwater after my Colorado Rift River raft tipped over.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see the intimidating figure of Surf Hill and the crush of people that seemed to constantly pour into the (also deadly) wave pool. I remember the shouts of angry men, who in hindsight were surely drunk, throwing punches over perceived line cutting. 

At the same time, I also clearly remember the thrills I associated with many of these attractions. I never did take the foolish step of boarding the Alpine Slide (which was on our “hell no” list) or climbing to the pinnacle of surf hill. But I dove into the wave pool headfirst and spent multiple hours sneaking back into the Colorado River Ride after a just-finished run.

Grappling with all of that helps me understand what Class Action Park is trying to do. Really, there’s no way to tackle this documentary through the grim perspective of a recklessly constructed park that claimed multiple lives over an almost 20-year period. The fact of its existence is inherently funny, if darkly so.

But you also can’t laugh your way through that whole story. People did die, more than once, and in one case there were multiple deaths on the same attraction. There’s no getting around the genuine misery that rippled out from Action Park’s existence. But there’s also no denying the strong sense of nostalgia possessed by the people who got to visit the park during its life, and the bizarre, perhaps misplaced sense of pride they have in any scars they still bear.

That dichotomy is as much an aspect of the original Action Park experience as it is of the documentary. We’ll never be able to visit that place and time again, and the world is better off for it. But Class Action Park‘s gleeful dive into this conflicted past manages to perfectly tap into the strangeness of remembering that time you put your life on the line for the thrill of a water slide.

Class Action Park is now streaming on HBO Max.