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.
