One Way Ticket to Hell

...considering that none of the actors had any dialogue and considering the lousy music.

"Cassandra Leigh" (Barbara Marks) is a young high school senior who makes good grades but feels suffocated at home by her domineering mother. One day while at work she meets a small group of motorcyclists and decides to start hanging out with them. One thing leads to another and soon she begins devoting more and more time smoking marijuana with her new friends while spending less time with her family and former friends. She also begins neglecting her homework which results in her grades dropping to such a significant degree that she is no longer eligible for entry into a college. With few other choices available she decides to marry her high school boyfriend but then finds life so meaningless that she soon gravitates to drugs. It's at this time that her life spirals out of control. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie and risk spoiling it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that I thought the underlying story was quite interesting. Unfortunately, the method of using a narrative style--instead of having the actors speaking their lines--really hurt the overall entertainment value of the film. As a matter of fact, this technique almost made it seem more like a documentary than a movie. Again, it had an interesting plot but all things considered I have to rate this movie as below average.

The film revolves around the character of Cassandra, a teen who gets mixed up with a bunch of bikers who smoke reefers. Most of the bikers look like nerds, and, of course, everyone knows that nerds smoke grass every chance they can. (I started, immediately after viewing this film.) Somehow, Cassandra manages to marry a decent boy named Johnny Adams, but can't stay away from the weed and the bikes. Despite Johnny getting her a dog and her doctor giving her sleeping pills (nice move, Doc - your name ain't Kevorkian, is it?), she falls deeper into the dumper. In several scenes, she crawls along the ground, impersonating David Hasselhoff sans the hamburger. Eventually, she hooks up with a chubby heroin addict, various sundry sordid characters, and finally, a Latin American junkie, played by director Price. Price gives the best performance in the film, which isn't saying much. Price's father, oddly enough named B. Lawrence Price, Sr., appears in the film as Cassandra's stepfather. The Johnny character simply disappears from the film, as well as the dog.

There is no dialogue, just narration by "Lt. David Jason." This puts the film on a par with "The Beast of Yucca Flats," but at least Beast had Tor Johnson around for laughs.

The film is basically a one-hour documentary, not nearly as entertaining as those 1950s educational films which tell you to avoid restrooms along the highways, what to do on a first date, how to practice good hygiene, and how to kiss your butt goodbye when the commies bomb us.

Based on entertainment alone, I have to give this a 10! It was so refreshingly...different. Different than now. Like a lot! So serious...hilarious!

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.