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"This is not a Hollywood production as can be readily seen. The quality is below their standards. However, most of these scenes were taken under adverse conditions. Nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood, our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received only top billing on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies. They paid the price with their lives..."

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Signal 30 is the radio call-code that authorities use to designate a traffic accident with fatalities. And that's what the majority of this short involves; showing us -- without blinking, the results of metal meeting metal at high rates of speed, and what's left of the drivers that are pried out of the resulting wreckage. Most of the Driver's Ed shorts I remember watching usually saved the real carnage for the end as a final punctuation mark on the dangers found on the road. But not with Signal 30. Heck no. Here, what borderlines as atrocity footage is used as a hammer to bludgeon us into remembering the Three-Es of highway safety: Education, Enforcement and Engineering.

And after a brief look at police training, routine traffic stops, general violations, and a couple of near misses, the accident footage comes fast and furious and brutal. And though most accidents featured are due to driver's negligence, the indifferent narrator is so scathing in his delivery that you begin to question his humanity.

And that's about it, really.

The End

You can keep your Faces of Death. I survived Driver's Ed!

My first experience with this type of road safety film was back in grade school. But instead of four-wheels of death, we got the watered down, two-wheeled version on bicycle safety. First came a lecture from the creepily-bionical "Mike the Talking Bike", with his evil visage that lit up every time he spoke -- his face being a cardboard box with a smiley face carved into it, with a light bulb stuck inside, mounted on the handlebars. It was supposed to be friendly looking, but it sure looked demonic to me. After that came the slide presentation, where the improper use of a bicycle usually resulted in a comical accident that generated a roar of laughter from the audience. No dead bodies this time -- thank you, Santa.

It wasn't until later, in high school, and the dreaded Driver's Ed class that I caught my first glimpse of blood on the asphalt. I don't recall the name of the film, but it wasn't quite as harsh and, like I mentioned before, only concluded with a few brief scenes of actual auto accidents. Then, in my junior year, during what I like to call my lawless period, I found myself arrested and stuck in a diversionary program. (What was I arrested for? I'll never tell -- but it wasn't for an MIP or DUI.) And it was here that I saw Signal 30 for the first and, what I assumed to be, only time until I recently tracked it down for this retrospective.

Even for a Driver's Ed scare film there isn't much of a plot to Signal 30. Luckily, the film is [in theory] a fairly brief 28-minutes long but about twenty-five of it is just gratuitous. Any longer and some of us with weaker constitutions -- when the carnage is all too real, might have lost it.

Under the guise of serving a public need, the Mansfred, Ohio based Highway Safety Foundation is legendary for it's mass production of these orgies of death and twisted metal littering our nations highways: Wheels of Tragedy, Mechanized Death, and Highways of Agony, to name a few, were high on the moralizing, overshadowing the lessons to be learned, and reinforcing these notions with actual footage of real accidents and mangled bodies -- topped off by the moaning and wailing of the injured and dying.

Under the direction of Richard "Dick" Wayman, these films pulled no punches and were made with the assistance of the Ohio State Patrol. Wayman was rumored to be an insomniac, and with camera in hand, was always ready, willing, and able to go and film these accident scenes at a moments notice. The HSF also dabbled in filming police procedurals and training films, and the foundation gained some notoriety in the 1950's for assisting and documenting a few late night police raids on several highway rest areas, bushwhacking and arresting rendezvousing homosexuals in the restrooms. Somewhat ironically, Wayman and the HSF would later come under fire for allegedly funneling money to make some pornographic movies. 

It was around the same time that Signal 30 -- it's own kind of porn, in a way -- was cobbled together. And there is a fine line between trying to do good, and getting your rocks off looking at death and destruction, and this film kinda rubs you the wrong way after awhile. They try to sanitize it by taking the moral high ground with the police procedural and family notification stuff, but I don't buy it. The camera spends way too much time lingering on the carnage, well after the point is made.

Why? Why would anyone force anybody to watch this kind of stuff in the name of education?

The optimist in me would believe that the adults have our safety in mind, trying to teach us one of life's hard lessons that actions have consequences. The skeptic is -- well, skeptical, and thinks parents back then were just as scared of their kids as those kids are now terrified of their own offspring today -- and the only way to get through to them is to scare 'em straight. The origin of these kinds of short films actually began back in the 1930's, when factories owners, in cahoots with their insurance providers, began to produce safety procedurals for their workers. Did they have the worker's safety in mind, or were they trying to shift accident liability from themselves onto the workers? 

The other shorts we've seen so far in this ATOMIC-Wedgies retrospective are easy to laugh and poke fun at. Most Driver's Ed scare films are, too -- and I think The Last Date is the epitome of the genre -- until they go over the line. When they start to resemble a snuff film, then there's nothing really to laugh at as far as I'm concerned. These are real people. And these people are injured -- or dead, and I find no pleasure in other people's pain and misery. Sorry. If that makes me a prude; fine. So be it. I'm cool with that.

You see, things change when they hit a little too close to home. I lost my oldest sister, Chris, back in 1978 when she died in a car wreck. I was also the one who answered the door when the police arrived to notify us she was gone. I was also unfortunate enough to see footage of her flattened vehicle on the ten o'clock news, and it's an image that was seared into my seven-year-old brain that I'll never be able to get rid of. For as most memories of my sister fade away, a clear mental picture of that flattened, tan, two-door, Cutlass Supreme still haunts me to this day.