Guest review by Dan Berman

This highly acclaimed documentary feature certainly brings out a lost genre in filmmaking. Hell’s Highway recovers a particular form of film going that has not been seen since the early eighties. The documentary dredges up the nightmarish world of being in a horrible car accident. The kind where there is no recovering from your fatal wounds. It explores a form of filmmaking that educators used between 1959 and 1979 to scare students into behaving themselves while on the road. These films showed students the dark consequences of careless driving: bloodstained wreckage; injured bodies; and fresh-corpses - even some beyond recognition. Written and directed by Documentary Filmmaker Bret Wood, Hell's Highway takes you on a frightful tour through pain and blood, into the disturbing realm that will most assuredly leave you sick. The documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the Highway Safety Foundation, an Ohio organization that created these notoriously graphic, and violent, controversial films.

The presented film clips were made legendary at the time from driver’s educational shorts like Signal 30 (1959), Highway’s Of Agony (1969), and Options To Live (1979). Hell’s Highway gives you a grim look at Americana with interviews by filmmakers responsible for the radical educational movement.
The film also broadens your view of the open road with recorded disturbing scenes of child molestation. The film reaches further into the archives with clips of a man who wants to molest two young girls. It holds onto your worst fears and never lets go; you only need to see it once to understand the dark, unrelenting message. It hits you from all points of view and doesn't leave you with much air at the end to breathe. It shows the audience first hand more than 20 Driver’s Ed Scare Films that you’ll remember for a long time to come. What was once a method of teaching, disappeared from American classrooms and has now assumed a mythical status among the people who watched them. Hell’s Highway: The True Story Of Highway Safety Films will never make my list of top films to see of 2003. But, it’s an honest and powerful look into driving safety scare films that are truly a lost form of filmmaking. It is as intelligently made, as it is unforgettable.

Its allure will bring your attention to the grimacing realities and consequences of not paying attention to everyday driving responsibilities like ignoring stop signs, railroad crossings and security gates. All of these little things that the film presents can end in a deadly game of life and death on the asphalt.

You’ll witness excerpts from fifteen shocking classroom films, including:

Mechanized Death (1961)
Wheels of Tragedy (1963)
Carrier or Killer (1965)
Death on the Highway (1965)
The Third Killer (1966)

Hell’s Highway in it’s own right is one of the darkest, most disturbing masterpieces that you’ll ever find anywhere. This small, rarely studied independent feature film more than likely won’t show up at the local movie house near you. But, if have the opportunity to view this film on DVD, it’s loaded with all kinds of extra features.

Dan Berman