5 Amusement Park Rides Too Metal For The United States

5 Formula Rossa Literally Launches You Like A Fighter Jet

Where: Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Ferrari World aims to give the public a taste of what it's like to drive a car worth more than their miserable lives. Such was the dream behind Formula Rossa: At first glance, it looks like nothing more than a Formula One-themed rollercoaster:

But as literally every Tinder profile can attest, looks can be deceiving. Formula Rossa employs the same technology that aircraft carriers use to fling fighter jets skyward, and all it has to fling is your drunk ass back through time. It is, quite simply, the fastest roller coaster in the world. As a point of comparison, Test Track -- the fastest ride at Walt Disney World -- hits a top speed of 65 miles per hour. Formula Rossa accelerates riders up to 149 miles per hour in just 4.9 seconds.

It's so fast that riders are required to wear protective goggles, because a fly to the eye at that speed would basically explode your ocular cavity. Here's what it looks like to go from zero to soiled in less than five seconds:

To get the full effect, let's flip the camera around to see what the front-row experiences:

Check out the guy on the right. Observe the way the skin of his face doesn't so much flatten as it does change states of matter. A few seconds in and his cheeks become a liquid. Soon after, his forehead becomes a gas.

4 Pyongyang Has Its Own Amusement Park! It Will Kill You!

Where: Mangyongdae Funfair, Pyongyang, North Korea

That looks like a pretty standard rollercoaster, right? Wrong: This one, located in North Korea, was designed by Kim Il-sung himself. Despite what the propaganda surely says, the man was not a professional rollercoaster designer (and while we're at it, he also probably didn't win a fistfight with the moon). The ride is, appropriately, nicknamed "The Pyongyang Roller Coaster Of Death." Why? Well just take a good, long gander at this close-up of the track:

Now, having seen the ... shall we say, less than ideal conditions of the tracks, watch this video of some folks riding it ... while frantically pointing out that their safety restraints don't work:

One Vice correspondent describes his visit to the park, where he had to wait "for nearly an hour while a guy with a mallet climbed up to the top and bashed a few loose screws back into place."

Then "the guys in charge sent a few terrified farmers on test runs like a shipment of human flour sacks."

Say what you want, but that's service: They'll rope in a dozen farmers for use as human crash test dummies just as a courtesy to visiting Westerners.

3 The Gotterflug Sky Roller Lets You Control The Ride

Where: Belantis Amusement Park, Leipzig, Germany

Gotterflug ("God's Flight") is not very fast. It's not very tall. In fact, it's not much different from Disney's Dumbo the Flying Elephant.

The main difference: Each seat comes with handles that allow the rider to control their tilt independently. Already that sounds like an impossibility in America -- no amusement park in their right mind would give riders such a dangerous amount of autonomy. And perhaps rightfully so: Here's a guy transforming Gotterflug into a human centrifuge for two full minutes.

If a rider has the proper appreciation for physics, or is just wildly unlucky, he can flap his way into a dead spin. No way that guy came out of this with his wits and innards intact. His liver is now where his lungs go, while his pancreas has coated the head of the guy next to him like an expensive hair gel.

2 Gravity Max Is Like Tipping Backwards In A Chair ... On A Skyscraper

Where: Lihpao Land, Taichung, Taiwan

Take a gander at Gravity Max: Notice how the track just sort of ... ends? It is not under construction. It's built that way on purpose, to torture you.

The passenger car rolls straight out onto that cut-off section of track and teeters there until your butthole swallows your pants, before finally swiveling a full 90 degrees. And before you accuse those reckless Taiwanese of playing fast and loose with human life, you should know it may have been inspired by existing American technology.

That's the X-Scream, located at the Stratosphere, nearly 900 feet above Las Vegas. But while the X-Scream tips over the edge, hangs there for a moment, and pulls back, the Gravity Max doesn't like to cocktease. Not only does it tip to a full right angle -- car pointing straight down -- but that's just the opening act for the drop itself.

1 The Entirely Homemade Italian Amusement Park/Sausage Stand

Where: Ai Pioppi, Battaglia, Italy

An Italian man simply known as 'Bruno' had two passions: Sausage, and amusement parks. By all accounts he makes a damn fine specimen of the former. We cannot attest to the latter.

His entirely handmade and unregulated amusement park/restaurant, Ai Pioppi, has rides like this:

And these:

This really all just serves to highlight the cultural differences between America and Europe. Here in the United States, Disney World has to let an entire water park go to rot over such paltry safety concerns as brain-eating amoeba. In Italy, the sausage guy can slap together an ad-hoc Thunderdome and the only concern is whether or not the rusty murder-coaster has enough wine-holders.

Jeremy Herbert is a Sagittarius, attempted filmmaker and fan of loud shirts. He writes about movies with the regularity of a national holiday at Who Spilled My Popcorn?. He tweets @DDayFilms slightly more often.

For more rides that probably shouldn't exist, check out 7 Actual Theme Park Attractions Clearly Designed By Maniacs and The 6 Most Terrifying Theme Park Rides Ever Built.

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