Kino on Video presents an engaging look at the Highway Safety Foundation with their packed release of
Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films
. Packaged here in a special double-disc edition, this set dives into the vast history of Ohio's grassroots company that changed the face of educational safety forever. The film is presented in a 1.33:1 full-screen image for the well-maintained archival footage, with the new interviews being filmed in a 1.85:1 widescreen picture. Extras on the first disc include two trailers and almost 15 minutes of additional outtakes that flesh out more of the human stories from some of the participants. On disc two, the bulk of the extras begin with three of the Foundation's complete driver's ed shorts, including
Signal 30
,
Highways of Agony
, and
Options to Live
. Fourteen excerpts from the Highway Safety Foundation are also provided, along with a clip from
Death on the Highway
-- a notorious safety film from their main competing company, The Suicide Club (most commonly known for doctoring up traffic accident photos with red paint for a more jarring effect). In the last section, the entire pressbook for the film can be browsed through four segments covering everything from production notes, a historical timeline of the Foundation, a 55-page image gallery, and an interview with the director. By the end, you should probably have had your fill of extreme vintage safety for quite a while. Still, it's a fantastic release whose exhaustiveness on the subject can't be beat (also documented on Fantoma's Educational Archives Vol. 3: Driver's Ed disc), and with people like Something Weird's Mike Vraney and the remaining Foundation members lending a hand, one should expect nothing less.