I love watching quirky documentaries. I’ve written a few roundups of them here and here and the streaming service algorithms know how to throw them my way now.
The latest involves a water/thrill ride park with an unapologetic body count that operated in Vernon, New Jersey from 1978 to 1997. The park, owned by Gene Mulvihill, was called Action Park, and the documentary on HBO Max is called Class Action Park.
Mulvihill, referred to in the well-produced film as “Gordon Gecko before there was a Gordon Gecko,” was a failed penny stock Wall Street financier with a vision for creating a free-range amusement park with “no rules,” run by underpaid, underage workers, lots of booze, and a complete lack of any safety standards. He’s like an unhinged, deranged Walt Disney who built a kids Jackass park version of Disneyworld where up to 100 kids a day were injured and at least six people died, but no one is really sure of the number.
He bought a 69-acre ski resort in Jersey next to a Playboy Club, and started designing rides on the back of napkins, including a water slide with a loop, where he’d test a ride by handing bloodied young kids $100 if they made it to the bottom. Some kids got cut on other kids' teeth that were stuck on the padding inside the loop. In the documentary it’s stated that the only way a person can experience 9G’s is in a fighter jet or inside the 90-degree angle leading into that mishap-laden loop.
Another ride, nicknamed the “Man in the Ball in the Ball,” placed a kid inside a steel ball to roll down the mountain on a PVC pipe track, but it ended up being so heavy and unwieldy that the ball crushed the pipes designed to hold it, and it avalanched down the mountain and across the highway with a kid inside, finally landing in a swamp.
Water rides took no safety into concern: one launched kids out a chute 10 feet in air into 17 feet of water, whether or not they could swim. If they were discovered drowning by a (rare) lifeguard, they were pulled out and given a wristband that said “CFS.” It stood for “Can’t Fucking Swim,” and kids were sent about their way.
On a ride called the “Tarzan Swing,” kids swung out into what turned out to be a freezing cold natural (and polluted) stream, with a deck full of teenagers screaming and mocking them while genitals were exposed, kids landed on their heads concussed, and many shoulders were dislocated on landing. Local ambulance companies were overwhelmed with calls to the park.
Owner Mulvihill didn’t want to pay to insure the park so he set up a fake insurance company overseas, also using it as a vehicle to launder money. He faced a 110-count indictment and was found guilty of fraud, theft, conspiracy and other crimes, but somehow (can anyone say mafia?) escaped justice time and again, mainly by having officials at every level in his pocket. The state of New Jersey was so sick of dealing with all his violations, they eventually sold him the 69 acres he’d rented for an $800,000 pittance. He bullied his way out of lawsuits by gaining a reputation for fighting them, not paying anyone until Federal Marshals showed up at the door.
It's a place where the speed boats were in a pond loaded with dead fish, oil pollution and four-foot snakes. People would jump the motor cars from the track onto the highway, they painted the bottom of the wave pool white “so they could see the bodies better,” and employees 16 and under got drunk and had sex in the lifeguard shed. It’s an 1980s movie script that writes itself.
It’s also an amazing documentary: local kids who used to work there or sneak off to ride their bikes to the park are incredible interviewees and fun to watch, and there are very sad and harrowing moments in the documentary, including a mother who lost her son to a deadly ride.
While the park was a testament to unbridled 1980s greed and capitalism, even Trump refused to invest in the park after seeing it. Despite the danger, former parkgoers have a sense of nostalgia about the one-of-a-kind place, so different from how today’s kids grow up, one stating: “It was an era of latchkey kids on adventures far from the eyes of worried parents.”