By this point in the summer, you've hopefully had your fill of funnel cake, rickety wooden roller coasters, and sitting on the wet assprints of kids who rode on the log flume but didn't bother to dry off before hitting the Ferris wheel. Oh, and you've hopefully been to an amusement park or two.
And, if you're really adventurous, you can skip the traditional theme parks and visit those places where childhood dreams are traded for reality-questioning befuddlement that will have you shrieking at shadows until your sallow, withered form dissolves into ash 9,000 years later because fear has made you immortal.
This lovely lady is named Alicia, and she rests in peace in Guadalajara, Mexico. From the outside, it looks like Cher put on a blonde wig and posed for a prostate exam. From the inside, it's like The Magic School Bus on acid. Let's dive in!
Starting off, you can look left and peer into the innards of Alicia/Blonde Cher, who has conveniently placed black lights around her jaw so that you can get a better look at the semen stains that are no doubt in there forever.
It's just the jaw, so there isn't much to see here. Let's move furth- what the shit is that above you?
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Who knew Honeycomb was part of Satan's complete breakfast?
Since when do tonsils look like beehives from a B-list horror movie set? Let's get a move on before someone realizes they forgot their EpiPen.
Conveniently, her heart is located literally directly underneath her tonsils. Either Alicia was born with some major defects or she is representative of the ergonomic slug beasts humanity will inevitably evolve into. Whatever the case, this is probably less of a theme park attraction and more of a place medical students go to learn about abnormal development.
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Or she's losing weight on the Daenerys Targaryen diet.
Moving along, the ribcage is illuminated by more shitty black lights as we make our way into her vitals and JESUS CHRIST SHE'S PREGNANT.
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Sleeping so peacefully like that, you can hardly tell he's the Antichrist.
Alicia, we're sending out a task force to find who did this to you, because we're betting it was a cruel medical experiment. Alicia is clearly suffering. We know this not because her heart is in her throat and not because she's pregnant but because her femur is attached to her large intestine, and it looks like Escher's poop fetish made manifest in a science exhibit.
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Bye, Alicia.
We're going to attempt to actively avoid toilet humor here, but holy shit is it going to be hard. Crap, already screwed it up! Dammit. Porcelain! FUCK.
Anyway, the Restroom Cultural Park is the brainchild of a man named Sim Jae-duck, affectionately nicknamed "Mr. Toilet" because of all of his work in sanitation. He was responsible for the push to improve city toilets during the 2002 World Cup and helped found the World Toilet Association. When asked, "If you love toilets so much, why don't you marry them?" he probably laughed before retiring to the bathroom to make out with Mrs. Toilet.
The idea behind the Restroom Cultural Park is to celebrate humankind's rise from pooping behind trees with all of creation ogling to defecating in peace and privacy like kings. Unfortunately, the park uses statues mid-excretion to make the point. So, yes, there are lots of statues of people pooping. Here's a mom catching her kid's poop, for some reason:
Haewoojae
"What can I say? The dog likes to be hand-fed."
There are statues pooping on cinder blocks and crying about it:
Haewoojae
You would too if you ran out of Charmin and had to use a pine cone.
There are naked butt cheeks squirting happy anthropomorphic poops on murals:
Reuters / Kim Hong-Ji
"Hi, we're your burger and fries from yesterday!"
And for anyone who's ever fantasized about playing on a statue of dookie, you're not going to find a better vacation destination than the Potty Park.
Reuters / Kim Hong-Ji
Imagine if John Hammond cloned dinosaurs, euthanized them after two months,
and then started selling tickets.
Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
From a distance, the Wiener (HA!) Prater looks like your standard amusement park. The swirling void nestled within becomes visible only once you've entered the park, and by then the wrought iron gates have already swung shut behind you as disembodied, maniacal laughter serrates the silence. Why? Now you're trapped with this thing and all of its cousins:
dreamalittledream.ca
And they're all hungry.
The park, located in Austria, used to be a royal hunting ground, but it was donated to the public in 1766 to be used as a "leisure center." But who are we kidding? It's still a hunting ground. The type of hunting has just shifted from royal fox hunts to the kind of hunting that happens when Silent Hill meets Springfield:
dreamalittledream.ca
We all remember the part of the game with robot Marge Simpson, right?
There's a little bit of something here from every person's LSD-induced hallucinations, including hatching dinosaurs with dongs for noses:
Prater Vienna
The rare and terrifying dildophosaurus.
Giant babies taking abnormally small adults for a walk:
And even a mutant fly baby with a television head, vomiting in technicolor at your feet:
dreamalittledream.ca
The same thing happened to any TV ever tuned to The Tom Green Show.
Even one of the kiddie rides starts out innocently enough -- with dioramas of fairy tales, like a whimsical scene of Hansel and Gretel playing on a seesaw. And while it's still more tame than other areas of the park, it quickly devolves into the realm of horror:
dreamalittledream.ca TV
"Who wants a nice, heaping plate of Chef Boyardee Gretelroni?"
Because certain sections of the park are tailored for children, most people are going to bring them along, which is bound to prompt some awkward conversations with your kids about fairy anatomy:
dreamalittledream.ca
"Son, the fairies are just doing a naked rain dance. Don't look."
Admission to the park itself is free, provided you attribute no value to your soul.
Like peanut butter and lab-strength hydrochloric acid, some things just don't go together. And whoever added "homemade" and "amusement park attractions" to that list would probably like a word with the creator of the waterboarding attraction at Coney Island.
Say you're walking along at Coney island when you come across a ramshackle concrete building with SpongeBob graffiti on the side:
Creative Time
He's a sponge. Squidward is clearly watering him so that he doesn't dry out.
You walk up to the building and peer through the barred window, because why the fuck wouldn't you? This is the weirdest thing you've seen all day. Inside, you see a life-sized doll strapped to a table with another doll standing over it, holding a watering can.
The words "DONT WORRY IT'S ONLY A DREAM" are printed on the wall, but this only angers you because of the punctuation issues, and you're a pedantic jerk when it comes to grammar.
That's when your eyes come to rest on the dollar slot below the window with the huge "ONE DOLLAR" arrow pointing to it. You shrug and feed a dollar into the slot. Surely they wouldn't use your childhood love of SpongeBob to lead you astray.
Suddenly the dolls spring to life, and the standing one upends the watering can on the other's face. You recoil in pure terror from what you now realize is a waterboarding simulator.
NY Post
"Fun for the whole fami- GLURGH! AAAGLH!"
Somehow, this thing actually existed. The "Waterboard Thrill Ride" (one of those words is not like the others) was constructed by an artist named Steve Powers to criticize the U.S. use of waterboarding by ... tricking children into watching robots do it?
Sleep well tonight, children.
The idea of Parque EcoAlberto is to discourage potential illegal immigrants from continuing 800 miles north to the American border, and for $20 you too can schedule yourself a practice run. The experience includes sirens, dogs, yelling members of the border patrol, and drug smugglers. The only complaint we can come up with is that the fun lasts for only three hours.
Irina Zhorov / Fronteras
And the cocaine's only 10 percent pure, the cheap fucks.
Having never illegally crossed the border ourselves, we can't speak from personal experience on this one, but we do wonder how much of the attraction is realistic and how much is scare tactics drummed up in the prevention effort.
Irina Zhorov / Fronteras
"Ma'am, put your hands on your head and say, 'I will never flee to the USA.'"
Though we do suppose it's possible that U.S. soldiers and the Mexican cartel are involved in every real border crossing ...
Irina Zhorov / Fronteras
"Dad, are we having fun yet?"
"Quiet, son, or the nice cartel man will kick you in the head again."
Disney's "It's A Small World" is probably the most iconic theme park ride of all time. Because of this, cheap knockoffs have started to pop up in China, where copyright law is worth about as much as German money after World War I.
"Small Worlds" (subtle, we know) is a ride in Suzhou Amusement Land in China that mimics the popular Disney ride, but all the kids were lifted from Children Of The Corn.
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"It's a small world. There's nowhere to run."
If you and your kids happen to escape the horrible demon children, you'll be subjected to a wide range of intellectual property theft that puts Internet torrenting to shame. This ride has it all, including Chip and Mrs. Potts, the living glassware from Beauty And The Beast:
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Be our feast, be our feast.
Tigger and a band of ragtag Hundred Acre Wood Muppet impostors:
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"I've come here to eat hunny and maul babies. And I'm all out of hunny."
And if you run into danger (possibly from those zombie children), you can always call on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Voltron to come to your aid:
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When Voltron isn't busy giving the Turtles shit about how Michael Bay never ruined him, anyway.
And because just one of these monstrosities couldn't possibly be enough, China spawned another "Small World" knockoff ride called "Joyland At Action Park" (not to be confused with New Jersey's famed murderworld).
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90 percent Beauty And The Beast, 10 percent Bride Of Chucky
We wouldn't have thought it possible, but some of the imagery in this version of the ride is even more terrifying. There's a creepy diorama of tiny people tying down and climbing on a giant:
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The Jolly Green Giant clearly has a jolly giant debt to pay off, if this is where he's working now.
Not to mention a few huge severed hands lying around:
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The giant in the first image didn't make out so well ...
And what kiddie ride would be complete without the creatures that slither in and out of your darkest dreams?
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They're what Satan has at his used-car dealership.
But at least all of this is unintentionally scary. It's kind of adorable that they're trying to capture the innocent splendor of the original and failing so catastrophically. It's clearly just an innocent mista-
Theme Park Review
WHO WOULD DO THIS?!?!?
You might think that death and amusement parks go together only when some teenager jumps the roller coaster fence to retrieve his phone, but Japan would like to have a word with you. In the usual Japanese tradition of celebrating the horrifying, they opened a death row prison museum on the historic site of the now-defunct Abashiri Prison. And it's just down the road from the actual death row!
Alex Hoban / Vice
Just off by 500 yards ... and years.
The park's hilarious description on its own website reads like a creative writing student's essay about Japanese history:
One day, a government official with a fine beard came to the village. The official walked around the village and then climbed a mountain. And the found a spot he was looking for. On the north here was the Sea of Okhotsk, and Lake Abashiri was on the south. Lake Notori lied on the Westland a big river drifted at the foot of the mountain. "Oh, great. This is it! It is hard to escape from here. And it is easy for us to keep an eye on them."
And if a tour isn't enough to quell your hunger for ancient Japanese prison history, they have a cafeteria where they sell prison-style meals so you can ... eat what the prisoners ate? Yum?
RocketNews24
Toilet sake costs extra.
The park is filled with wax statues so that you can get the authentic prison experience we know you've all been dying for. If you've ever wondered what it looks like to sleep in a common bed with half a dozen other hardened criminals, Abashiri is the vacation destination for you.
Johannes Schonherr
They even sculpted the prisoners' faces so that you can tell which one is making a dutch oven.
But we know what you're really thinking: What does it look like when naked, tattooed Yakuza gang members chill out in the group bathtub? Wonder no more!
Alex Hoban / Vice
They even sculpted the guard's faces so that you can tell which one is seething with size envy.
The prison museum went so far as to include mock trials in the experience, because everyone knows you are tried inside the prison where you eventually serve your sentence, doy.
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"You are found guilty by the court. I sentence you to mock execution."
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Also be sure to check out 5 Insane Theme Parks You Won't Believe Were Almost Built and The 5 Most Unsettling Disney Theme Park Easter Eggs.
Kier Harris
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