something ain’t right down in Arkansas

Magic Springs park in Hot Springs, Arkansas is a smallish park on a hillside with a bunch of flat rides and a decent variety of coasters for such a small park. There's a kiddie coaster, a mine train, a wild mouse, a Vekoma suspended looping coaster, an out-and-back woodie with some nice Ozark scenic vistas, and THIS:

Firstly, that just looks wrong. It looks more like a thing under construction than a finished product. It certainly doesn't look like a coaster. This needs a closer investigation.

Watching it go around the course provides the fill-in information: It climbs the lift, does its little mid-air twist, comes back down. Done. It's the epitome of the one-trick pony ride, so it had better be a good trick.

First good thing: there are no shoulder bars on these cars. Shoulder bars can take a good coaster and just kill it by making it uncomfortable or painful to ride due to the rider's head making contact with the bars on turns and such. There is absolutely no reason to put shoulder bars on a coaster unless there are support poles so close that you need the bars to keep people from raising their arms. Aside from that, a good lap bar system and seats with side support are plenty safe, more comfortable, and far less likely to cause injury to the riders. These cars and the restraint system are pretty comfortable and so I'm a happy guy before the thing even starts going.

The lift hill is vertical - straight up. That much isn't so uncommon...

What messes with your mind, though, is that at the top of the vertical lift, rather than going over the top normally, the chain pulls your car into an upside-down position, fifteen stories above the ground. It's SLOW, too, so you're going to be hanging by your lap bar. It's a doubly-good thing that the restraints are comfy!

It's at this point, when you've been pulled up and over, that the pony's one trick really kicks in: the view. Oh, not the stunning view of the Ozark mountains or even the rest of the park, but the spindly little wisp of track, impossibly twisted, jutting out into space with no visible means of support. Sorry, but there is nothing that you can tell your brain at this point that will convince it that this is actually supposed to look like this. Just no way. It's one of the most mind-bending, disorienting, deliciously bizarre things I've ever seen. You only get a second or two to look at it, though, since the car eases off the chain lift and rolls s-l-o-w-l-y down this track, still upside-down. You're hanging by the lap bar, more than 100ft in the air, the track in front of you doesn't look real, and you're just CRAWLING.

Finally, the lead car begins to twist upright and the cars pick up a bit of speed.

You roll over the top of the track, counter-clockwise, then back to the upside-down position you started in.

After the slow roll, the sudden breakneck speed of the vertical dive back to earth is gasp-inducing. You rocket through the station and halfway back up the lift before gravity brings the cars to a halt.

The lift chain then catches the cars and reverses, easing you backward into the station, breathless and giggling. Yes, it's a short little one-trick ride, but WOW, what a trick. Even after multiple rides, my brain still couldn't grasp the reality of that Twizzler track stuck out in space. It was a blast.