Camp Trump

A Review of the documentary Class Action Park

What’s past is prologue is such an overused phrase and an all-too obvious truism. It reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke: “My friend showed me a photo and said, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger.”

And yet, can the past also be epilogue?

I ask this silly question because watching the documentary Class Action Park from directors Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott III felt like it put a sad cap on the last five disgusting years of Trump supporters and their ilk. Not that we’re done with them, but they are not unlike the underage and uneducated lunatics who helped run the asylum that was mad mogul Eugene Mulvihill’s late and all-too lamented Action Park.

They all had their fun, regardless of who was hurt.

I never went to the infamous Action Park in New Jersey, but watching Class Action Park for the first twenty minutes made me feel a wave of nostalgia for experiences I never had. The film digs up these kind of emotions throughout, and a good deal of the first half of it feels so whimsical. The animated clips help play down the more gruesome and frightening details of Mulvihill’s infamous park rides. Details like lost teeth and designers with little to no credible engineering backgrounds.