One Way Ticket to Hell (1955)
BOMB (out of 4)
Cassandra (Barbara Marks) was once a sweet, innocent little girl but sadly she was raised by a mother who jumped from man to man. Eventually Cassandra starts dating a biker, which leads her to trying marijuana for the first time. Pretty soon she's a strung out heroin addict but can anyone save her life?
According to the IMDB, the director Bamlet Lawrence Price Jr. shot this for $14,000 while attending UCLA. This was his Master's thesis film and I should mention a student film. With that said, I love the "drug" genre that this film is trying to be a part of. With that said, movies like REEFER MADNESS and others were awful films that were thankfully so bad that you could laugh at them.
Sadly, ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL isn't so bad it's good. Instead it's just downright awful on every level and even though I understand the conditions that it was made, it's still impossible to find anything nice to say about the picture. Like a lot of movies from this period, it's told via narration ike you'd see during an episode of Dragnet. The problem is that there's nothing interesting beign said to us and even worse is the actual lead character.
I'm not sure what the director was going for but she's such an unlikeable character that you just don't care whether she lives or dies. You don't care about the people around here and there's just nothing here to connect with. The entire film comes in at just 58-minutes and it honestly felt ten times that. The film was really hard to make it through as you're smacked in the face with one bad scene after another.
