Smash-Up on Interstate 5

After years of disaster films set on planes, ocean liners and even on trains, we finally got one set on the freeway. Other than that, it is just like the rest of the seemingly endless parade of mid-1970's disaster epics. Also, the characters were just like the ones in the others. You had the lonely rich middle age lady who finds love with a trucker, the older couple facing a terminal illness, the young lovers on the run and the vengeful cop looking for his partner's killer. All of these characters could have been put on the plane, train or ship but instead they are all on a collision course on a major California freeway. Also, it was pretty interesting that this film began with the "smash-up" and showed all the events leading up to it and showing it again at the end and all the aftermaths. For all its faults, it still was a pretty good film.

SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5 begins with a brief introduction to the various drivers involved in the catastrophe of the title, before plunging us into the vehicular mayhem, complete with slow-motion impacts!

Next, we're shown the lives of the victims, two days before the incident. This is made up of a true, all-star cast of 1970's TV luminaries, elder stars, and future celebrities.

Robert Conrad is a highway patrolman. Vera Miles is the lonely Erica. Scott Jacoby is a small-time crook, who got mixed up with a fugitive from justice. Buddy Ebson and Harriet Nelson are a loving, retired couple. David Groh is a trucker. Sue Lyon is a biker chick.

Even the co-stars are great! There's an impossibly young, Tommy Lee Jones as a cop, and Donna Mills as a pediatric nurse!

Unlike many such films, the individual backstories are actually interesting. The characters are fleshed-out well, and carry on intelligent conversations. We come to "know" and care about these people. So, when disaster strikes, it's tragic, and not just another action sequence.

Highly recommended, especially for the 1970's TV-movie connoisseur...

SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5 was one of the most entertaining entries on the Tuesday and Wednesday Movies of the Week. This episodic drama, somehow economically told in 90 minutes, opens with a spectacular 39-car crash on a deserted stretch of highway. The film then flashes back 48 hours before the crash occurs and through multiple stories we get to meet all of the people involved in the crash and what they were going through at the time of the crash. The impressive all-star cast includes Vera Miles, Robert Conrad, Donna Mills, Buddy Ebsen, David Groh, Scott Jacoby, and there's an especially lovely turn by Harriet Nelson, widow of TV icon Ozzie Nelson. I like the way this movie showed us the crash first and then took us back. For some reason, it made us care even more about these people, knowing what was ahead for them.

Have you ever been in a severe traffic accident? I have... And even though it was nearly 20 years ago, I can assure you the narrated words during the opening sequences catapulted me straight back to the exact same sentiments I felt in the first hours and days after the accident. "For the majority of people, the victims of this smash-up will be nothing more than a holiday weekend statistic". That's also how I felt after I crashed into a tree on a Friday night and miraculously came out almost unharmed. In the blink of an eye, you're nothing more than a weekend traffic statistic. But behind every traffic casualty sits a person with his/her own story to tell, and that's what this modest but more than admirable made-for-TV disaster movie wants to emphasize.

In the weekend leading up to the 4th of July, we follow of handful of seemingly random people living in the area between Los Angeles and San Diego. Now, from the title and the opening sequences we already know these same random people will be the ones heavily impacted by the traffic accident on Interstate 5 (39 vehicles, 65 injured, 14 deaths) but before that tragedy happens, they are all "common" people dealing with versatile issues, like accepting medical diagnoses, romantic dilemmas and running from the law. It's not exactly the most exhilarating segmented film ever made, but it perfectly does what it intends, namely giving a background to usually anonymous traffic accident victims.

"Smash-Up on Interstate 5" can rely on the competences of the best TV-movie director in history, John Llewellyn Moxy, and has quite an impressive cast, with Robert Conrad, Vera Miles, Donna Mills, Scott Jacoby and Tommy Lee Jones. For the latter, it was still a relatively small role, in the period shortly before his breakthrough.

The 1976 TV movie SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5 was one of the many disaster movies that popped up on the small screen during the 1970s as a spin-off of the larger big-screen efforts like EARTHQUAKE and THE TOWERING INFERNO.

Instead of being set in a plane, a train, or in a highrise, this film's disaster takes place along one of the most heavily traveled highways in America--Interstate 5 in Southern California. In flashbacks, it depicts the film's main characters in the forty-eight hours leading up to those frightening moment when dozens of vehicles pile into one another in a freakish fashion. Featuring such TV stalwarts as Robert Conrad, David Groh, and Donna Mills, as well as a young Tommy Lee Jones (still four years away from his breakthrough role in COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER), SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5, given the melodramatics of the situation, is fairly well-directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, who helmed the classic 1972 TV film THE NIGHT STALKER, and with a reasonably convincing pile-up scene.