Teenage Devil Dolls (1952)

Oh no! Barbie's on smack!

Teenage Devil Dolls (AKA One Way Ticket to Hell) (1952)
Directed by Bamlet Lawrence Price, Jr.
Written by Bamlet Lawrence Price, Jr.
Produced by Bamlet Lawrence Price, Jr.

Okay, I think you already see what the problem here is—somebody told young Bamlet that he was another Orson Welles. As this movie demonstrates, however, he’s not even another Orson Bean. And what do we learn from all this? Well, that when mixed-up kids who have no other outlets for their angst are subjected to peer pressure, they turn to filmmaking, and it’s society as a whole that suffers.

Anyway, Teenage Devil Dolls presents the horrifying story of a young auteur who didn’t have enough money to shoot a sound track and had to rely on over-dubbed narration to tell his story. It’s also about heroin.

Let’s join our movie, already in progress. It’s the morning of September the 11th, 1952. We know this because the narrator has a compulsion about giving the exact time that everything happens—I hear there are now drugs to treat this kind of thing. Our main characters are assembled at the train station: Martinez (Bamlet Lawrence Price Jr. yet again), a really wimpy drug lord; Cassandra, a perky, pony-tailed miss who looks just like Barbie, the “teenage devil doll” of the title; and Lt. Jason, a square-jawed police officer who claims to be our narrator’s onscreen persona.

Cassandra is being sent to a Federal Narcotics Hospital, which is a proud day in every young girl’s life. Martinez, Cassandra’s pusher/boyfriend has come to try to renew their love. Lt. Jason confides that addicts have a strange code of ethics, so he is staying close to Cassandra, “even though she now has sufficient reason to hate my penis.” (Okay, he may have really said something about her having cause to hate Martinez, but that’s not what it sounded like.)

The rumble of motorcycles causes Lt. Jason to dreamily recall that “Motorcycles were a part of Cassandra’s turbulent past,” and then suddenly it’s 1949. Cassandra stares blankly at the camera to convey teen-age angst, while her mother glares at her to indicate oppression (this is basically the all-mime version of Rebel Without a Cause).

When some kids on choppers pull up at the sweatshop where Cassandra works, she rides off with them. Poor, weak Cassandra is unable to resist the terrible peer pressure they exert on her by handing her a reefer, and soon she is laughing maniacally, which can’t be good.

Now that she’s an addict, Cassandra’s old friends start avoiding her. Everyone but Johnny, the poor lunkhead who waits outside the school to walk her home every afternoon. Thanks to this process of elimination, it’s a quickie wedding to the lunkhead, then Cassandra steps into the exciting world housewifedom! The lesson here is as obvious as it is chilling: Marijuana leads to marriage.

The “emotionally immature and badly adjusted” Cassandra can’t cope with the taunting cries of “ring-around-the-collar” that come from the laundry, and begins crying hysterically while hanging up clothes. Johnny knows that most young brides do this in the bedroom, not the back yard, and concludes she has a problem. The doctor diagnoses it as “post-marital depression,” and gives her some sleeping pills, reasoning that the cure for marriage is more sleep. Alas, the mother’s little helpers don’t help, and soon Cassandra is back with the Heck’s Angels. Yes, “Cassandra had kicked over the traces and pulled out the stops,” Lt. Jason tells us. She has “started the long road the junkies call ‘the route.’” Ah, the junkies have such a colorful patois, so rich and expressive!

One day Johnny comes home to find Cassandra rolling around in the back yard in apparent homage to the Three Stooges, and finally makes that call to Hazleton. But Cassandra, who thought it was a General Foods International Coffee flavor, doesn’t like the program and runs away.

She gets a carhop job at “Hamburger Hotdogs,” where her duties consist of delivering marijuana under the food trays. And you should try their Quarter Pounders With Weed! Eventually, Cassandra becomes involved with Sven Bergman, a heroin dealer and director of gloomy art films about playing chess with death. Suddenly, there’s a high-pitched shrieking tone, signaling that Cassandra is now addicted to smack, or else the movie is airing a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

The highly efficient Lt. Jason arrests all the dealers in town with the exception of Martinez, the sleazy director/writer/actor we met at the beginning of the movie. Cassandra immediately signs up to be his bitch, since her tenure with the Swedish heroin cartel didn’t work out that well.

When Cassandra and Martinez stop at a service station, Lt. Jason scares her by strolling over to say hello. Cassie pantomimes dismay and horror (she apparently does hate his penis), and she and Martinez drive into the desert and hide in a cave. The cops spot their abandoned car, and, with a cry of “finder’s keepers!” also discover the couple’s heroin stash in the glove compartment. See, the runaways had forgotten they were “slaves to a needle.” One would think this is something a junkie would remember.

Soon the 107-degree heat and the lack of water and heroin cause our two druggies to writhe on the ground, foam at the mouth, and get tattoos. Cassandra eventually crawls out of the cave to lie in the direct sunlight, apparently hoping to get rid of her junkie pallor. Lt. Jason finds her and carries her lifeless body out of the shot.

Now, back in 1952, Cassandra is off to Betty Ford Memorial Penitentiary, apparently none the worse for having died. Martinez is also looking well, having survived the withdrawal, the heat, the dehydration, as well as the long walk back to L.A. And he owes it all to drugs! Anyway, Cassandra gets on the train. The cops arrest Martinez. Our narrator informs us that the Cassandra will probably never be cured, and will only come to a degrading end in some other movie. As if that wasn’t depressing enough, we are then given a screen full of statistics—for instance, there has been a 2000% increase in the number of juvenile addicts over the past ten years. Extrapolating from this data, it means that by 1964, the entire country will be addicted to narcotics, which explains how they got away with that bizarre color scheme on Shindig! It also explains why the set of the Mike Douglas Show, a program directed at middle-aged, Lark-smoking Midwestern ladies in hairnets, was bedecked with psychedelic Flower Power daisies. Now you know. Even though your Aunt Ruth from Fergus Falls favored quilted housecoats, adored Lawrence Welk, and faithfully brought her delightful lima bean-and-Velveeta hotdish to Casserole Night at the Lutheran Church, behind your back she was mainlining horse.

So what does this movie teach us about handling the problems of today’s teens? Well, Teenage Devil Doll, much like the U.S. Justice Department, propounds the “gateway” theory of narcotics addiction. This hypothesis holds that the use of a relatively mild mood-altering substance such as nicotine or marijuana inevitably leads to a craving for more powerful mind-warping agents such as matrimony. According to a recent DEA-funded study by the Harvard School of Medicine, motorcycles lead directly to the use of cannabis, with potentially serious side effects such as fake laughter, flashbacks, and excessive narration. Laundry, experts warn, can lead to involuntary Curly Howard impressions, while employment in the fast food industry leads to fornication with Swedes, death by exposure, and, uh...a train ride.

Therefore, the lessons troubled teens should take from this shocking exposé are twofold: 1) Drugs are bad, and will kill you, and then bring you back to life, and 2) The policeman is your friend, and you should trust him, no matter how much you may hate his penis.

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