NEW 2K RESTORATION
Bret Wood’s
HELL’S HIGHWAY
The True Story Of Highway Safety Films
SPECIAL PRESENTATION IN SELECT CITIES NATIONWIDE AUGUST 5
Alamo New Mission (San Francisco, CA); Alamo Wrigleyville (Chicago, IL); Alamo Raleigh (Raleigh, NC); Alamo Cedars (Dallas, TX); Alamo Liberty (New York, NY); Orpheum (Saugerties, NY); Alamo Sloans Lake (Denver, CO); Zeitgeist Arts (Arabi, LA)
Opens September 16 in NYC at the Roxy Cinema
“‘Hell’s Highway’ is a hoot!”
– Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post
“Unnerving and much fun!”
– A. O. Scott, The New York Times
“A Lynchian view of the nightmarish underbelly of middle America”
– David Edelstein, Filmmaker Magazine
“Weirdly nostalgic…viscerally unsettling!”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“Unnerving, darkly funny, and impossible to forget.”
– Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club
SYNOPSIS:
Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is a morbidly curious exploration of the near mythical driver education films shown to American schoolchildren in the 1960s and ‘70s. Produced between 1959 and 1979 in Mansfield, Ohio, films such as Signal 30 (1959) encouraged safety by force-feeding high school kids color footage of careless driving’s dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses.
In the 1970s and ’80s, these traumatic films disappeared from the American classroom and assumed an almost mythical status. Eager to document this obscure chapter of cinema history, filmmaker and restorationist Bret Wood compiled these vanishing artifacts of grim Americana into a feature, and interviewed the filmmakers responsible for this misguided educational movement.
Originally produced in 2002 in standard-definition video, this new edition of Hell’s Highway has been reconstructed by Wood through the remastering of the original 16mm interview footage, as new restorations of the original educational films which appear throughout the documentary.
