Hell's Highway (2002)

MOVIE #1,436 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.12.24 So I goofed up and wound up watching almost thirty minutes of ANOTHER “Hell’s Highway” movie — a documentary called Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films from 2003 — before realizing something seemed off. I consulted my watchlist to discover that there were actually two different Hell’s Highway pictures on there: this shot-on-video horror film and the 1932 pre-code film I just reviewed. So I tracked down the former, and put the doc off to the side. For what it’s worth, I did end up finishing that third movie and quite enjoyed it, and will post my critique of it at a later date. A rare TWO 4 TUESDAY where not only were both movies really good, but a bonus third one was as well. My cup runneth over.

Jeff Leroy’s SOV horror romp is a delight. The SOV horror era is yet another glaring blind spot for yours truly, but rest assured I will be wading in these waters again as soon as possible. I mulled over doing a beat-by-beat plot synopsis style review for this but I think it’s better if you see it for yourself.

I will highlight this one sequence, which drains every ounce of drama from the simple action of a man receiving an alert on his pager. This is pure cinema…


There’s so much creative practical effects and editing here that you really do forget about the low-grade aesthetics (not that they’re necessarily negative anyway). Sure, the acting is bad — none worse than porn star Ron Jeremy who gets disemboweled while driving in his single brief scene — but that adds to the charm as well.

Things start to get disjointed by the end (the edit gets more and more frenetic). And the leftfield plot twist at the end is simply an unintentional comic delight. All in all, this is (intentionally) ridiculous but extremely fun.

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Hell's Highway is a 2002 American horror film written and directed by Jeff Leroy. It was released on January 12, 2002.