ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL - Bamlet Lawrence Price Jr. - "Teenage Devil Dolls" (1955)

 Tonight's Saturday Night Special is all about choices!

Choices, choices, choices!!!  To be a junkie, or not to be a junkie, that is the question! What's a person supposed to do?

 "One Way Ticket To Hell," also fondly remembered as "Teenage Devil Dolls," is a miserable story! Miserable, I think that's a very good description! No wonder we've got such a drug problem today if this is the way it was 66 years ago. Moving forward into the future is supposedly called progress, but I think that time is moving backwards as far as progress in heroin abuse and society is concerned!

 "Teenage Devil Dolls" is a quasi-documentary about the downfall of a young woman caused mostly by drug abuse! There is no dialogue, just sound effects, music, and a narration by this guy, Lt. David Jason as played by Robert A. Sherry but, Robert A. Sherry is just the actor, another fellow named Kurt Martell is doing the actual talking!

"One Way Ticket To Hell" starts at the end. This guy, Bamlet Lawrence Price Jr. is a no good troublemaker named Miguel 'Cholo' Martinez, and he's skulking around trying to get his girlfriend back! Bamlet was born in Tulare County, California, not a town, but a county, and not only plays this part, he also wrote, directed, edited, and produced this film! I guess I must have lead a sheltered life, because I grew up in the same Central Valley, and I never knew anything about drugs until 1967, some twelve years later! Beer was our drug of choice!

 The trouble all starts with motorcycles, and the lure of the wind blowing between your ears, and then it just escalates from there! Bottom line, motorcycles are the real gateway drug!

 After motorcycles, it's the herbs grown in the Devil's Garden, Marijuana!

 Barbara Marks is Cassandra Leigh, a girl with nothing but problems! This might have been Barbara's only acting credit, but she worked in the Editorial Department on "The Godfather," and "Apocalypse Now!"

After marijuana comes marrying a guy who is in love with you just so you can escape your dreadful home life!

But that doesn't work because Cassandra is not meant to be doing cooking and cleaning!

Her sole purpose in life is to get high!

After motorcycles, pot, and a shitty marriage, what could be next? 

That's right, booze!

The next step is over the counter drugs. Because she has problems sleeping, Cassandra gets a prescription for Seconal that she fills seven times more than she is supposed to in only one week!

With a loving family like this, why would anybody turn to drugs?

I just threw in this shot because I like it!

Cassandra leaves her husband, and gets a job as a carhop, and while she's delivering the food, some customers get the extra bonus of some weed brought to their cars too!

Cassandra is a mess!!

Cassandra makes a friend, somebody she can finally relate to!

Cassandra and her new best friend  Margo take up selling marijuana on the street. Elaine Lindenbaum is Margo, and this is her only acting credit. They are popular merchants because all the potheads think it's cool that two chicks are dealing. Unfortunately it also draws the attention of the authorities and other street vendors, and everything starts unraveling, and going to Hell really fast from here!

From there Cassandra and Margo get involved with heroin and Mexican gangsters! The heroin supplies become real low on the street, and there are a lot of distressed junkies!

 How often do you get a cop with an eyepatch, and the world's biggest phone all in the same shot?

The cops aren't playing around! They chase Cassandra and Cholo into the desert where they almost die, and she is finally captured and taken off to rehab again, and believe it or not, Cholo gets away, and only eventually gets caught because of what he's doing at the beginning of the film, wanting to get Cassandra back!

Yep, lots of bad choices!

You can download or watch "Teenage Devil Doll" at the Internet Archive, or if you just want to get a quick fix, the whole thing can be watched on YouTube!

"Teenage Devil Dolls"

SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING / A Blood Marriage Of Ghouls! - 1976

In the quest to post as many movie reviews as we can before we grind ourselves into dust, well, here's another one to add to the list. It's a direct to video story about a man from LA who travels to Monterey Bay for his sister's funeral, he wants to find out why she has killed herself. He discovers that she is actually a vampire that has returned from the dead to take revenge on her family!.. Since when is a Vampire a Ghoul?!

This 61 minute movie stars Greg (only acting credit) Braddock, Lisa (only acting credit) Milano, Ray (BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS) Myles and Barrett (NIGHT OF THE DEMON) Cooper...

This thing gets going when Nina Gray opens a casket with a vampire inside! Then, she starts making weird sounds, slits her wrist and dies, huh?

Mark Gray, Nina's bro from LA, is staying at her house until he solves the mystery of her death. A detective drops in and tells Mark the haps. Nina died at a different location and Mark wants to know what's up with the blood in her room...

Mark finds the novel Nina's been working on, it's about the 'high' worshiping of Satan, whatever that's supposed to mean!

A visiting family member gets attacked by vampire Nina while just going upstairs! Mark her off the list...

Then, Auntie hears some strange sounds outside her bedroom (she lives there) and is shocked when Nina 2.0 appears bearing the goofiest fangs ever! You can take Auntie off the hit list too!

Here's yet another shot of a vintage record player in a movie that we always like to show.

Mark wants to check out the location where Nina died...

Now what?!!.. So, check out the blood, you can see that it was painted on with a flat tip brush, where, they should have used a round tip, dummies!

It's a nice foggy day in Monterey Bay!.. Whoa, I'm a poet an' don't know it.

Anyway, Mark goes back to the vampires' lair to confront their leader, Father Daken.

So, Mark realizes that he's a bit outnumbered by vampires!..

Then, they roll out the detective to show Mark what could happen to him! The moment he gets the chance, Mark runs like Hell out the door!

Some vampire goons chase Mark all the way to his car, he barely gets away only to crash his car and die on his way back to LA! There you have it, the end to this little horror flick...

MR. WIZARD - Don Herbert (1951 - 1972)

 Not to be confused with "The Wizard of Mars," or "The Wizard of Oz," "Mr. Wizard" was real, and he was also legit! So come on in, cause it's a Wizard Wednesday down in The Dungeon!

It's quite possible that "Mr. Wizard" was a witch or brujo. The first show aired in 1951, and was on the air in some shape or form until 1972. Stare at the words long enough, and it looks like Mr. Witchard, and he does things that are beyond human comprehension, kind of like David Blaine does today!

This episode was titled "Six Kinds Of Electricity," and aired in 1964. Mr. Wizard has got some electronic beats circa "Forbidden Planet" going on when his little pal Alan drops by!

That's right, a speaker, a measuring spoon, and a funnel is what's driving this crazy sound!

Mr. Wizard could take a dog turd, a paper clip saturated in sodium silicate, and some tin foil, and make a mini-nuclear power plant out of it, and every Saturday morning right around seven or eight, before or after "Sky King," or "Fury," I was glued to the TV watching this stuff!

This is a perfect example of the same stupid curiosity that keeps me going today! "Mr. Wizard" has built a Rube Goldberg device comprised of six electric sources all just to automatically adjust the volume control on this record player! If you don't know what a record is, then skip to part 13!

The thingamajig makes the whatchamacallit create static electricity which makes the balloon move, and allows the projector to cast light on the sensor on the right!

Which in turn fires up the bike tire generator.......

.......And you know, there absolutely had to be a mousetrap involved in this Gyro Gearloose contraption somewhere!

Oh, an ionic flambastic bionic transformameter, I get it!

 All I could think of was a twenty-two year old Lou Reed watching this show and getting inspired one Saturday morning!

As it turns out, there are many ways to create electricity, like chemicals.

Heat also works to make current!

Crystals can be manipulated to create a minor amount of electricity via the Piezoelectric method of power generation! (That's really krazy!)

So they literally fire up this automatic volume control adjuster to see if it works!

Those chemicals catching fire was part of the plan! Don't try this at home kids!

And after it goes through all the various sources of electricity, the volume on the record player does go down! For most people, a hand-worked volume control knob is good enough, but not for "Mr. Wizard!"

Here's a fact about Don Herbert that thousands of people wish they had in their biographies, he, along with Bill Murray was one of the guests on the first "Late Night With David Letterman" in 1982!

Alan didn't do much after this, but if you watch the movie "Little Big Man," he's playing the character of the adolescent Jack Crabb!

When you're full of despair, and you've got nobody else to turn to, you can always call out for help from Mr. Wizard, as Tooter Turtle used to do back in 1960!!

"The bottom just fell out of everything, Help Mr. Wizard!!"