'Highway': Cars With Big Fins & Kids With Bloody Finishes

Ah, sweet and tender high school memories: First slow dance. First tentative kiss. First headless, mangled corpse crumpled into the ruin of a '61 Ford Fairlane.

So it was for several generations of American youth in the presence of a cultural artifact known as the highway safety film. Lurid, grotesque, even unwatchable, the films took you to real accident scenes along the turnpike and were meant to shock the impetuous young into acknowledgement of certain physical realities of the universe. So here's the modest, amusing documentary "Hell's Highway," a bit of cultural anthropology that explores this forgotten (or never-forgotten: Many kids ran to the washrooms to spew into the johns) byway of American education.

It's -- well, good or bad isn't quite an option. It's an exhumation, not a work of art. Generically, it fits into a category that might be called kitsch video, of the sort the most extensive video catalogues sometimes offer in their back pages for the truly burned out. These include anti-VD films, anti-marijuana films, anti-clique films, and so forth; in other words, all the forms of political correctness of bygone eras, all offered with that same banal tone of earnest moral probity and delivered in the stylizations of their periods. From the late '50s to the late '70s, when most of these films were made, film music tended to be loud and overstated. That's a particular hallmark of the highway safety films. The soundtracks, with their thundering drums and blasting horns, seem particularly bombastic. You have to laugh.

There are other moments of inadvertent comedy. "Hell's Highway," for example, opens with one of the most legendary shots from the oeuvre: the literal realization of the ominous factoid "if all the highway deaths in a single year were set end on end, the line of bodies would reach ___ miles." I leave the mileage blank because various municipalities filled in their own estimate. In any event, when the filmic geniuses at the Highway Safety Foundation of Mansfield, Ohio (the 20th Century Fox of highway safety movies) turned this concept into an actual shot, they didn't raid a morgue. It was the '50s, but things weren't that bad.

Instead, they got high school kids to play dead in dramatic poses on a mile or so of abandoned road, then slowly drove along the line of mock corpses in a Volkswagen minibus, camera whirring busily. The result has a kind of Beckett-like surrealism, mile after mile of vigorously twisted but otherwise pristine bodies lying out on the windy plains of the Buckeye State. Seeing it today, you think: Wow, did they ever wear crummy shoes in the '50s.

Anyway, that shot probably represents the artistic apogee of the films, which were otherwise put together with little thought of aesthetics: mostly night shots, full of flashing gumball lights, laconic cops, frenzied medical personnel and the very, very bloody and the very, very dead. Ugh. Why are real corpses so squalid? I think it's because they aren't "posed" in any way, but flop with utter graceless indifference -- weight, not life.

The litany of slaughter that filmmaker Bret Wood excerpts does in fact grow tedious after a while, but he has unearthed two moments of particular horror: the dead baby under the car and the live sound of some poor girl screaming insanely in raw pain.

Wood is very much a straight-ahead kind of guy as he loots the archives for his cutting and pasting. He lets the films be funny in their own right (by their having beamed down from the planet of the past), instead of trying to add camp notes of his own or cop a superior attitude from the safe altitude of hindsight. He shows clips from the classics -- "Signal 30" was the "Birth of a Nation" of highway death movies, with "Wheels of Tragedy" and "Highways of Agony" not far behind. He interviews the main cameraman and the production supervisor of the films, who turn out to be two old small-town Ohio gentlemen who look back on how they spent their lives with equal amounts of wonder and regret about all those nights spent in the drizzle, watching bodies pulled out of twisted steel.

He even investigates what had to be an urban legend of the time, which is that the folksy Highway Safety Foundation was actually a front for a porno film racket, a charge that seemed to spring up out of people's natural preference for conspiracy over normalcy.

"Hell's Highway" is a hoot, but it still has the kick in the head it gave when you saw it projected on a portable screen in the gymnasium. The dead are still dead, speed still kills and there's nothing funny about babies crushed by automobiles.

Hell's Highway: The True Story of the Highway Safety Films (87 minutes, at Visions Cinema Bistro Lounge) is not rated but includes gory scenes of death and severe trauma.