Hell's Highway

Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is a documentary by Bret Wood that takes a comprehensive look at the gory educational films that were foisted on millions of high school kids across the nation between 1959 through 1979. The films were put out by the Highway Safety Foundation, based out of Mansfield, Ohio, and they embraced shock value as a legitimate scare tactic to get their message across. The founder of the company, Richard Wayman, got the seed for his idea in 1954 when he encountered a fatal accident and took photographs that were helpful to the police. This turned into a penchant for accident photography that enlisted the help of others. It then mutated into a slideshow, and then in 1959 the first film, Signal 30, was put out. The instructional storylines were punctuated with scenes of real roadside carnage that would not soon be forgotten by the kids who saw them. The results were not unlike a Twilight Zone episode laced with gruesome footage from one of the Faces of Death shockumentaries. They might start out with ominous warnings. ("Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone.") They might use simple recreations to convey the set-up for the accident. But what they all had that gave them instant notoriety were filmed moments of real people caught in smoldering wrecks. These scenes, captured on 16mm, might show a few survivors - but most are already dead or, even worse, still dying. Whether the films actually improved highway safety is anyone's guess, but they certainly had an impact on the imaginations (or nightmares) of many an impressionable mind. Hell's Highway deftly cuts between excerpts from the highway safety films to contemporary interviews with surviving members of the company and other knowledgeable players. Anyone who thinks the subject might be a one-trick pony will be fascinated to see a larger circus at play that marginally includes names like Jimmy Hoffa (photographed on a Time magazine cover with one of the H.S.F. film cans in hand) or Sammy Davis, Jr. (the host of a star-studded 20-hour H.S.F. telethon that included guests such as Muhammad Ali and Ray Charles). The H.S.F. also veers off-road in interesting directions, putting out instructionals on child molesters and shoplifters, before its financial collapse in 1974 (it had a brief resurrection later under the slightly different moniker of Highway Safety Films, Inc.). This includes jarring footage taken by the H.S.F. of sting operations in public restrooms that caught otherwise upstanding citizens, literally, with their pants down and engaged in sexual acts. Obviously the latter footage was not shown in high school classrooms, but its use by and for law enforcement is disturbing in unexpected ways. Kino provides the optimal viewing of Hell's Highway with a double-dvd set. The first disk includes the main feature, a trailer, a teaser, and outtakes that feature deleted scenes from the interviews that flush out more details on both the people and the company behind the highway safety films. The supplemental disk is the real bonus, for it provides three complete highway safety films, Signal 30, Highways of Agony (1969), and Option To Live (1979). It also includes excerpts from fifteen other highway safety films, a pressbook that includes a chronology of company events, a gallery of images and documents, and an interview with the director. In the latter, the director makes an interesting defense for his decision not to reference J.G. Ballard's novel, Crash, despite the correlations others might find, because "You can smell the blood when you watch a film like Highways of Agony. When you read Crash, you're deeply impressed but all you smell is a typewriter ribbon." While the H.S.F. may be a thing of the past, its spirit lives on thanks to the Ohio Department of Public Safety which just released Signal 30, Part II: Tragedy and Hope (2002). The wreckage is now caught on video instead of film, and the faces of the victims are digitally blurred out, but the message remains the same: you could be next. For more information about Hell's Highway, visit Kino International. To order Hell's Highway, go to TCM Shopping. by Pablo Kjolseth