Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films

HELL'S HIGHWAY is a documentary about those educational / safety films that flickered in many a darkened classroom of yesteryear. The best of these films were the "Driver's Ed." movies. Hyper-dramatic, preachy, and, in retrospect, extremely entertaining, these moralistic tales are very watchable today.

The concept of "Teenicide": the idea that teens are just an accident waiting to happen, is as hilarious today as it was serious way back when.

The switch from the early, choreographed films to those containing actual car accident footage is chronicled. The shocking images are discussed, as well as their impact and the reasoning behind them. The ghoulish nature of the films, the filmmakers, and those creepy narrators are also examined.

Though the movies themselves were / are exploitative and manipulative, this documentary is quite informative. It even explores the Highway Safety Foundation, its alleged connections to pornography, and a murder mystery involving one of its photographers!

In addition, there's an interesting segment featuring none other than Jimmy Hoffa!

Plus, the company's most controversial films about homosexual encounters and child molestation, the latter of which traumatized many an elementary school student!

An educational, entertaining investigation into these short films...

For just about anyone who took a driver's ed course in the sixties and seventies, those grisly highway safety films were usually the first exposure to the horrible truth about human mortality. For me, it was a little opus called "Death on the Highway". In my high school, you heard accounts of just what was in that film long before you finally got to see it. I saw it when I was seventeen, before I ever saw "Faces of Death 1", rotten.com, the footage of Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out, or the actual suicide of an unemployed dishwasher who jumped from the roof of a twelve-story building on a summer afternoon in 1986. "Hell's Highway" contains excerpts from "Death on The Highway", including the unforgettable image of two dead toddlers lying side by side, one with an arm severed. I've carried that image with me for thirty years, and when I saw it again in "Hell's Highway", I discovered that it hadn't altered a jot in my memory.

What makes "Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films" so very satisfying as a documentary is that it strives to cover its fascinating and obscure topic from every possible perspective. Therefore we have interview footage of John Butler, retired Chief of Police of Mansfield, Ohio, Earl Deems, who produced several of these 16mm traumafests, and Mike Vraney, head honcho at "Something Weird Video" who now markets these films to the morbidly curious. Everyone who speaks in this movie speaks intelligently, and is portrayed respectfully. No one is satirized or treated condescendingly. Part social history, part memoir, part critique, "Hell's Highway" focuses mainly on a company called Highway Safety Films, the film-making arm of the Highway safety Commision, which operated out of Mansfield from 1959 to 1979, and produced "Signal 30", "Mechanized Death", "Wheels of Tragedy", and "Highway Of Agony", among others.

Many of the interview subjects discuss whether showing grisly footage of bloody corpses being pulled from car wrecks to teenage kids actually made them safer drivers. To my way of thinking, it can't be proved either way, and the rule of "you can lead a horse to water, but the rule of "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" applies here. In other words, it would be irresponsible for educators not to try to make every effort to impress upon young drivers the consequences of reckless driving. What they do with the knowledge is not under the educator's control or responsibility.

The version of this film that I found in my Public Library came with a bonus DVD containing uncut versions of three of the best-known productions of the Highway Safety commission's short subjects. Personally, I think that watching these things still have the power to make the viewer want to pay attention to every last stop sign.

Hell's Highway: True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003)

** (out of 4)

Pretty disappointing documentary taking a look at the Highway Safety Films of the 60s and 70s. I was really looking forward to this thing but nothing really worked out too well. The interviews were rather boring, which is what really killed this. The film picks up in the final fifteen-minutes when we hear debates on whether these films did any good or not. I personally found the actual videos to be nothing more than offensive, tasteless scare tactics. Footage included one film where cops flips over a car to discover a dead baby that has been smashed to death. There are countless other bloody clips where people's heads are stuck through windshields and so on.

There's nothing cliché, or square, when it comes to waking people up. If you tell a teenager "DON'T Do IT", they probably will for the thrill of it. More people have died each year of car accidents than pandemics. So the idea of speaking to young or old driver's is preachy, and a waste of time is naïve. The automobile has been around since the early 1900's and the 1950's blossomed stupid "rebel without a cause" spoiled teenager movies, like Brando, the wild one. Something was desperately needed to SCARE the Hell out of people in general from driving like jackasses. These films like Signal 30, or blood on the highway was what was needed at the time. People today are just as stupid driving while texting. Its no better today, just more air-bags to combat the air-heads behind the wheel.

A great idea,but a rather shaky production.Great interviews with members of the Foundation,and video archivists.They missed the chance to possibly interview those who appeared in the films (as victims) and those who recreated scenes in their films (like Wheels of Tragedy).But overall,thank goodness this genre has been given a new voice.Kids today laugh at death and blood.Society has felt it better to shield kids from the reality of death and agony rather than shock them/damage them,with the truth.Death isn't pretty,but its reality.Many thousands die every year,and millions are injured....what better subject to showcase than the fact that car crashes kill and maim American lives.For those who feel that sacraficing even one soldier in Iraq or Afganistan is wrong,just stop and think....how many Americans die in just ONE day on our roads? And nothing our "mighty" SUVs,pickups,semis,muscle cars or exotic imports can prevent.People die in EVERY vehicle,in every state and in every town.And over time,in every street.Think about that next time you tool around town talking on the cell phone or adjusting your radio knob.Take the advice these films were meant to give...think,use your head,and fear for your life.You will be a much safer driver as a result.