A fascinating companion piece to last year's superb Christian-haunted-house documentary Hell House, Hell's Highway captures another hypnotic slice of American life in the explicit car-safety scare films that traumatized generations of American children with gory crashes and grim cautionary tales. Bret Wood's straightforward documentary focuses on Highway Safety Films Inc., a company that dominated the field in large part due to an almost unhealthy commitment to realism. Rather than just staging car crashes (although they did plenty of that), the company's employees often hustled to the sites of horrific crashes to shoot footage of real-life fatalities. The result is almost unbearably horrifying. Though some of the movie's subjects insist that contemporary society's ever-growing explicitness has made the car-safety films' gore and guts less jarring, the film suggests otherwise, as its footage of dead infants and mangled teens is disturbing in a way modern-day horror films could never be. Hell's Highway acknowledges the boundless camp value of stilted narration, awkward acting, and ham-fisted scare tactics–representative titles like Wheels Of Tragedy, Mechanized Death, and Carrier Or Killer wouldn't feel out of place in Troy McClure's filmography–but the film serves up more than cheap laughs. Highway Safety Films detoured into darker territory in the mid-'60s, branching out into films about child molestation and illicit gay sex in public bathrooms. The beginning of the end, strangely enough, came when supporter Sammy Davis Jr. top-lined the company's telethon, which ended up costing much more than it made. Whether the car-safety film's legacy can be calculated through decreased auto fatalities or adolescent nightmares remains open to debate. But, like the movies it documents, Hell's Highway is unnerving, darkly funny, and impossible to forget.