Hell's Highway: The True Story of the Highway Safety Film

MOVIE #1,590 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.30.24 I watched this movie by accident. On a recent TWO 4 TUESDAY, I reviewed a couplet of films titled Hell’s Highway (1932 and 2002), but I mistakenly picked out this little-known documentary in between. I was halfway through this one when I realized my mistake so I just finished it, and truth be told: this is so much more fascinating than you would think simply by reading the title. And credit to the filmmaker — Bret Wood, writer-director of 2006’s Psychopathia Sexualis — for that. It's a tight doc with surprises around every corner. It’s also a wonderful showcase for exactly what that title says: a slew of footage from the dawn of the educational film up through the aforementioned, and often horrifying safety videos that are the central focus. While I watched this against a weird convergence of things in the background, I’m glad I did.

But there were also two talking heads in the film who proved serendipitous: Rick Prelinger (he of the Prelinger Archives, which I was literally checking out right before watching this) and Mike Vraney (founder of Something Weird Video, who produced two of the Frank Henenlotter documentaries I recently reviewed). I don’t think that’s terribly interesting to anyone besides ME but it’s something!

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The history of traffic safety educational films and their notoriously lurid content. It was released on June 27, 2003.