Today's WTF Daguerreotype Moment is brought to you courtesy of my new favorite weblog, Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, and shows amateur anthropologist, Major General Horatio Gordon Robley posing in front of his collection of smoked, tattooed Maori heads.

Yes, you heard me correctly, they're the heads of Maori chiefs preserved by smoking after being detached from the bodies of their owners by Maori warriors. Many of these heads were sold to European collectors like Robley and wound up in museum collections.

Those were the days.

[Link: Robley’s Collection of Tattooed Heads]
[Link: Bio of Major General Robley]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Super Galdelic Hour is a Sony PS2 demo that features ultra-kawaii Japanese CGI furries whacking moles, drawing pies, and bumping butt. If you like that sort of thing, you can order your own copy off eBay.

[Link: Super Galdelic Hour][uploaded by mrneutrongodeon]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The mighty COOP waxes eloquent while expounding upon the hinky joys of the San Fransisco Wax Museum. Funny stuff. Believe it or not, that's supposed to be Elvira, Mistress of the Dark in the photo above. I think it looks more like Joan Collins. At least they got her boobs right, which is Elvira's onlymost important feature anyway.

And in other COOP news, I had no idea he has his own House Industries font kit. How cool is that?

[Link: San Francisco Wax Museum: The Horror! The Horror!]
[Link: Typography of Coop and Rat Fink Fonts]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 6:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Going through some of my old posts on alt.cult-movies yesterday, I ran across several mentions of the 1934 sleazefest, Maniac, directed by Dwain Esper of Reefer Madness fame, with craptastic cinematography by Glen, or Glenda's Bill Thompson. It's a truly amazing pre-Code exploitation film with a pseudo-psychiatric subtext that features mad scientists, incoherent soliloquies on the nature of madness, semi-nude showgirls, female wrestling, body snatching, and eating cat eyeballs! Sample inspirational dialogue: "Isn't the spark that moves the maggot the self-same spark that moves the man?" Deep.

I still have a copy on VHS, but I hadn't watched it since the early 90s. I did a little searching, and found the entire film online at the Internet Archive. The file's huge (366MB), but if you're a fan of cult film, it's a must-see. I've created a small preview clip you can watch to help you decide if it's worth it.

[Link: Maniac preview clip (4.8MB, .AVI)]
[Link: Maniac review from The Bad Movie Report]
[Link: Internet Archive download]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)