DVD Talk / DVD Savant's "The Most Impressive DVDs of 2003": “Hell's Highway is a sometimes difficult-to-watch docu on those gruesome scare movies shown to kids in the 50s and 60s, like Signal 30. Bret Wood has given his all to the tough task of explaining how they came about and where they were shown. It's a brave explorer in uncharted docu regions that succeeds by approaching its subject with extreme civility.”
The New York Times: “UNNERVING AND MUCH FUN! Grisly...exploration of the golden age and greatest auteurs of driver’s-ed cinema.”
Los Angeles Times: “ENDLESSLY FASCINATING!”
The Boston Globe: “HELL’S HIGHWAY is maybe the next best thing to putting ‘Deadman’s Curve’ on the turntable and cranking up the volume.”
L.A. Weekly : “HELL’S HIGHWAY is a surprisingly rich, in-depth examination of the birth, evolution and multilayered, even subliminal uses of educational films...Wood carefully juggles the camp elements with the keen assessments, creating a film that rivets from the first frame to the last.”
The Washington Post: “HELL’S HIGHWAY is a hoot!”
The Village Voice: “Like the movies it samples, HELL’S HIGHWAY is viscerally unsettling.”
dvdmaniacs.net:“ **** (Four Stars). Throughout its duration it remains a compelling and...very strange but informative piece that raises almost as many questions as it answers.”
DVD Savant: “Bret Wood has done what we didn't think possible, and that's to make a thoughtful, watchable, and worthwhile feature about the notorious true-life gore films of the 50s, 60s and 70s, the highway safety films that showed real auto fatalities, close-up in blood-drenched horror.”
Filmmaker: “A Lynchian view of the nightmarish underbelly of middle America.”
The Onion: “Unnerving, darkly funny, and impossible to forget.”
E! Online: “Grade: A This not-for-the-squeamish documentary will definitely make you think twice about not buckling up.”
New York Daily News: “Genuinely gripping slices of middle-Americana.”
Chicago Tribune: “LURID!”
Interviews with director Bret Wood and feature stories on HELL’S HIGHWAY have appeared on:
National Public Radio
CNN
Fox News Channel
BBC America
Salon.com
© 2003 Bret Wood