• Rating:
• Genre: History
• Movie Type: Social History
• Themes: Kids in Trouble, Dying Young, Car Racing
• Director: Bret Wood
• Main Cast: Helena Reckitt
• Release Year: 2002
• Country: US
• Run Time: 98 minutes
• MPAA Rating: R

Plot

As the 1950s drew to a close, high school hygiene films and VD cautionary tales gave birth to another, far more graphic sort of fear-inducing curriculum: the driver's-ed movie. Bearing such titles as Signal 30, The Third Killer, Wheels of Tragedy, and Highways of Agony, these films -- usually produced by the Highway Safety Foundation -- intercut staged, fictional tales of impudent hot-rodders and drunk-driving, non-safety-belt-wearing teens with actual accident footage. Director Bret Wood chronicles the history of this grisly subgenre with Hell's Highway, a documentary that details the growing need for teen-cautionary films in the late-'50s/early-'60s and the man who fulfilled it, Richard Wayman. Wayman, Wood learns, was an armchair policeman who liked to drop in on the scenes of various crimes, taking snapshots and other amateur-forensics data. He turned his hobby into a profession, however, when he hooked up with another accident-obsessive, Phyllis Vaughn, her sister, and a newspaper photographer. Pitching their idea to the Ohio Highway Patrol, the foursome went around to give lectures and slideshows to high schools; as their revenues and budgets grew, they began pre-packaging their worst-case driver scenarios in short films that were distributed nationwide throughout the '60s and '70s. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

Review

Anyone who took Driver's Education in an American Public School in the 1960s or '70s either saw such infamously gory "scare movies" as Signal 30, Mechanized Death, or Red Asphalt or heard the stories about them -- strange, cheaply made films which featured hideously bloody footage of actual auto accidents, designed to demonstrate the danger of carelessness behind the wheel but usually inspiring nausea and mass gross-outs among their audiences. Plenty of people over the years must have wondered, "Who the hell made these movies?" Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films not only answers that question, but reveals that the story is stranger and more fascinating than many of us might have expected. Hell's Highway deals in part with the subgenre of the blood-splattered Driver's Ed films, but mostly focuses on Highway Safety Films, an outfit from Mansfield, OH, which started out by putting together slide shows of auto accident snapshots, and eventually became a key producer of educational and industrial films, working with the cooperation of Ohio police officials in the making of movies about horrific auto accidents, safe driving tips for truck and bus drivers, and procedural techniques for police officers. How a handful of zealous police fans who liked chasing down auto accidents with cameras evolved into a organization that sponsored a financially ruinous "Highway Safety Telethon" starring Sammy Davis Jr., while also making films about child molestation and "sexual deviance" (aka men having sex with one another in public rest rooms), is an long, strange story, and Hell's Highway unfortunately seems to leave out a few pieces of the puzzle along the way. But the interviews with the former associates of HSF prexy Richard D. Wayman are both fascinating and informative, the comments from ephemeral film enthusiasts Richard Prelinger and Mike Vraney are insightful, and the memories of folks who saw these films during their days as impressionable youths testify to the effectiveness of these films, for good or ill (or sometimes both). While Hell's Highway is flawed (it might have been better if it was longer, allowing for more background on both the films and the full stories of the filmmakers), it's absorbing and entertaining, and takes both the films and the people who made them seriously without ignoring the strange undercurrents of this perverse corner of the universe of educational filmmaking. It's also certainly better than trying to sit through the films in question all by their lonesome. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Cast

• Helena Reckitt - Narrator

Sammy Davis, Jr.
Ronald Reagan

Credit

Bret Wood - Director; Bret Wood - Producer; Bret Wood - Screenwriter; Tommy Gibbons - Producer; Felicia Feaster - Producer; Steve Anderson - Cinematographer

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