George A. Romero’s restored ‘lost film’ is terrible — and a key part of his horror history

polygon.com:

This feature on The Amusement Park originally ran when the film debuted on Shudder. It has been updated for the movie’s digital rental and home-video release.

Few things make a cinephile’s heart flutter like the emergence of a “lost” film. Discoveries like the missing reels of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, which were unveiled in 2010, give hope that one day the missing Lon Chaney film London After Midnight, or any of the thousands of truly lost films, will magically be discovered, safely preserved in their tins, patiently waiting to be shown to hungry film fans. Thanks to studios’ flippant early attitudes about cinema, and the flammability of older movie technologies, being a movie-lover can often mean knowing that certain movies no longer exist, but still hanging onto hope.

That’s why the new wide release of the quasi-lost 1973 George A. Romero film The Amusement Park should be celebrated. The movie is an artifact, and an identifiable early step into his career as a master of horror. But there’s also no shame in admitting that it isn’t a holy grail, a secret masterpiece from an early horror maestro. At best, it’s a cult item and a novelty, basically a heavy-handed, inelegant Twilight Zone episode that was ultimately rejected by the religious organization that commissioned it.

While Romero is rightly worshipped as the godfather of modern zombie cinema, he didn’t necessarily set out to make the undead — or as he called them, “ghouls” — into his life’s work. Like most mortals, the guy had to eat, and to sustain that, he started his film career as an industrial and commercial producer and director. A cursory glance at his filmography over the years might give the impression that his rise to horror auteurdom was swift