Hell’s Highway Hell’s Highway Directed by Bret Wood ...

My older sister used to tell me stories about the highway safety films she was subjected to in driver's ed. She was appalled by them, but I was thrilled. Real blood? Brains on the dashboard? What could be better? I had so much to look forward to.

Then in 1981 I learned (to my horror) that I was to be part of the first generation not to be shown the likes of Red Asphalt and Signal 30 as an integral part of my driver's training. Instead, I got crash test dummies and grapefruit?which is why Hell's Highway is such a godsend. Now those of us who missed out finally have a chance to see first-hand what all the hubbub was about.

Kino's two-disc set is a gem of American cultural history. Disc one features Hell's Highway?Bret Wood's feature-length documentary about the (very odd) history of highway safety films and the legends which grew around them. Disc two features a wide-ranging sample of the films themselves.

In the mid-50s, a couple of concerned citizens working together with the Ohio State Highway Patrol began giving slide presentations at state fairs. The shows featured horrific police photographs of car wrecks, the idea being to scare people into driving more safely. Soon the slide shows evolved into movies, and before long the Highway Safety Foundation was born, producing masterpieces like Mechanized Death and Wheels of Tragedy. Only a small handful of people were involved in those days, running from wreck to wreck (all of them around Mansfield, OH) shooting what they could. Later they would edit the footage together and add a voiceover.

(The introduction to their first film, 1959's Signal 30, openly admits the film's lack of Hollywood gloss, adding, "Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and only received top billing on a tombstone.")

The gruesome, blood-drenched films were incredibly popular, and before long the Foundation branched out into trucker safety films, police training films and (if you believe one local journalist) even porn. Then in the mid-70s, the Foundation fell apart, leaving a legendary body of work behind them.

On disc two, the range of these films is made clear. Signal 30 is presented in its entirety, as is 1969's Highways of Agony and 1979's summation, Options to Live. There are also snippets from 20 of the Foundation's other pictures?including police training films like The Child Molester (which is creepy as hell).

In the end, though, it's the wrecks that stay with you, that footage of the torn bodies of speeders and drunk drivers. It may not have stopped anyone from speeding, but even in these jaded times it's effective material. It also makes you wonder if J.G. Ballard might've seen Highways of Agony one too many times.

?Jim Knipfel

Space is the Place Directed by John Coney (Plexifilm DVD) "You heard of this Sun Ra?" two youths from Oakland, CA, are asked in Space is the Place. "Dude's got a tight rap" one answers. The other defends Ra, saying, "He hasn't yet betrayed his black brethren to the racially exploitative and culturally co-opted white power structure."

That timely revolutionary rhetoric is a bald (and today risible) statement of the political ideas that made the avant-garde jazz pianist Sun Ra such an unusual figure. Ra himself went further with his own extraterrestrial, intergalactic mythology in which he, and his Solar Arkestra, would set up a colony for black people in outer space. In 1974's Space is the Place, a musical poli-sci-fi film that is both spoof and sincere projection, Ra tells a gathering of dissatisfied young blacks, "You don't exist in this society, you have no reality." (He's an iconic messenger like their Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton and Malcolm X posters.)

Sun Ra represents Escapism?not in the Hollywood sense of mindless distraction, but closer to the meaning that "escape" meant for slaves who knew they needed deliverance from an inhumane social system. He sought to provide it through a musical mythology that would put black folks back "in coordination with their spirit." During the 60s and 70s, the radical White Panthers grooved in solidarity to Ra's thesis, and today a similar hipsterism occurs with The Matrix Trilogy?an exploitation of sci-fi and sociological phenomena that is less playful and less authentic than Space is the Place.

This well-restored, vibrant DVD preserves an original moment when radicalism and rhythm resisted commercialization. Sun Ra portrays himself, battling against Repression, Decadence and Racism (in the form of NASA). It's loopy yet intriguing?the quintessential dilemma of such modern black pop artists as OutKast, whose new music videos Hey Ya and The Way You Move show unexpected, outlandish creativity (both directed by Bryan Barber). Like Sun Ra, these artists refuse to be pigeonholed or stereotyped. The fun of Space is the Place comes from Sun Ra, in sync with director John Coney, busting film genre the way his Arkestra also expanded beyond musical genres. They flip generic ritual, seeking revolution. A primal pop image shows two boys on a bike racing with Sun Ra, in full high priest regalia, as he cruises in a drop-top limousine. Can the next generation catch up?

?Armond White

The Mondo Cane Collection Directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi (Blue Underground) Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2 and Women of the World aren't what you'd call great films, but they are significant, and in the early 60s they were groundbreaking and shocking?globe-spanning documentaries focusing on human behavior at its most extreme and bizarre (only some of which was faked). Among other things, they were single-handedly responsible for the explosion, a quarter-century later, of "reality television."

But they aren't the reason to pick up Blue Underground's beautiful new eight-disc set.

The real reason is to see both the director's cuts and radically different U.S. versions of the long-unavailable Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom. Risking their lives, filmmakers Jacopetti and Prosperi whisked a camera crew to central Africa in 1963 just as British colonial forces were withdrawing. They wanted to film an Africa liberated from foreign influence for the first time in generations, an Africa finally free to be itself. They wanted to document how an Africa no longer under British rule would manage.

Africa Addio was intended to be a documentary about Africa in transition. Instead, it turned out to be a filmed record of one of the most tragic periods in African history. It's a brilliant, disturbing and bloody film, but upon its release, the filmmakers were immediately branded racist. The charges only grew worse when, for its American release, the film was severely edited and stripped of all political content. What was left was an hour and a half of Africans killing each other for no apparent reason.

In order to refute these charges and prove they weren't racists, Jacopetti and Prosperi set about to make a new film?which would also be their last together. Goodbye Uncle Tom was, simply put, a bad idea from the onset.

The idea was to explore the origins of the rage American blacks were feeling in the late-60s. After opening with news footage of riots and police beatings overdubbed with incendiary quotes from Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones, the directors slide into a fictional, dramatic "documentary" about slavery. Along with interviews with slave owners, traders, pro-slavery preachers and the like, there's footage of slave ships, slave auctions, daily life on the plantation and the Nat Turner rebellion. Interspersed throughout is more contemporary footage of riots and more quotes from black leaders.

How exactly did these two think they would come off as anti-racist in a film that plays like a Klan pep rally?

Goodbye Uncle Tom really is one of the most jaw-dropping films I've ever seen?and the U.S. version, which again edits out any contemporary political commentary, is a baffling, ugly, often horrifying and indispensable cultural artifact of just how badly things can go wrong sometimes.

?Jim Knipfel