Something Weird Video | Review by Sinferno
Among all educational films none are as revered or as feared as the driver's education videos from decades past. Drivers ed films such as these are the first attempt at using scaring the shit out of children as an instrument for teaching them.
Filled with candid accident aftermath footage showing bodies thrown from cars, brains jettisoned from skulls upon impact... yet always featuring the classic, impartial joyless voice of a narrator. If you've seen just one of these films in your life you will remember it. Isn't that the very kernel of education – having only to be told once?
And while I do not have any children, (at least none I know about) such films should be required viewing for youths about to get their first learner's permit or anyone else who thinks the FAST AND THE FURIOUS movies were "just good clean fun". While this set isn't as graphic cover-to-cover as the well-known Red Asphalt series, it does what all good nostalgia educational films do – they make you wonder about the strange sensibilities of the day. Or in this case, wonder at how deliciously insane their sex education films might have been.
Mechanized Death (1967)
While this one is the grisliest of the bunch, it is still the only segment that has any relevant message to the youth of today and that is "cars can kill". And kill they do. The bulk of the film is made up of real-life depictions of ambulance crews of the day pulling a motley collection of bodies from what would now be priceless antique cars. Most of the victims were teens, but when they pulled a tiny baby from out of a wreck I found myself reexamining my own real-life driving habits. Visually powerful, it is filled with very little useful information about actual safety such as buckling up, but instead just shows what happens if you make just one mistake out there, especially while driving drunk. The crying state trooper at the end would have been ridiculous in any other movie and I would have ripped it to shreds here, but considering the wreckage porn that came before it, I must say it was no less poignant than those anti-litter Keep America Beautiful ads from the early seventies featuring Iron Eyes Cody, better known as the "crying indian". What can I say, I just get all misty whenever I see angry-looking men clad in imposing uniforms weeping about carnage-strewn roadways. It just hits me right here...
Just In Case: Suppression of School Bus Fires (1978)
This one was stale beyond the pale. Before troublesome kids learned how to get attention in the nineties by shooting up schools, apparently one of the coolest things to do was to cut the stuffing out of the green Naugahyde seats, compose it into a wick and then set the bus on fire. Now THAT"S educational. But that's not all there is to this one, apparently bus fires can be caused by malfunctioning tire bearings and an engine overheating as well. By the time any educational film tells us to use our CB to get help "first and foremost", you can pretty much consign it to to the proverbial junkyard of obsolescence.
Fatal Stop: The Story of a Pretrip Inspection (1977)
This story begins where most others end. An overturned bus with scores of football players and cheerleaders sitting (almost nonchalantly), holding stage-bloodied bandages to their heads, wondering, why, why it had to happen? The answer rests more than a little with Charlie Shilling. In typical Tarantinoesque SMASH UP ON INTERSTATE 5 fashion, the action actually moves backwards, showing what happened before the fateful crash and the story of bus 32 and the big game at Fair Oaks. Charlie Shilling the bus driver is enjoying his day off, taking an always fun assortment of pills and a glass of unknown liquid. A sudden phone call urges him into duty. While i'st all too obvious to anyone watching that he wasn't feeling up to it and probably under the influence of any number of controlled substances, being the true professional he is he takes the gig. When he arrives at work with an irritable but good-natured incompetence, he is told that he will be driving a different bus than his usual one. Charlie grumbles and begins his safety check, but a sudden call from an impatient coach of the football team forces him to abandon his usual eighty point inspection and from there it's all over but the sound of wailing and dramatic trumpet flourishes. Had Charlie spent more time studying his bus, especially the single bulge on his left front tire instead of the shapely dimples of Connie his favorite cheerleader who he touches in a familial way that has litigation written all over it, this accident simply wouldn't have had to happen. Despite the actions of Charlie Schilling himself (which are all manner of dirty, lecherous and drunken) this one is needlessly dry and tedious. Who knew that a school bus had more equipment to check before operation than a small aircraft? And moreover, who cares? A time capsule of instruction that is every bit as tedious as the day it was released thirty years ago. Poor Charlie.
Boobytrap! (1977)
Not to be confused with the other 1970's Something Weird film BOOBY TRAP about a deranged Vietnam vet who drives an RV filled with explosives to a rock festival to kill a bunch of hippies, this BOOBYTRAP is about highway structures which accelerate the grisly aftermath of an accident such as light poles, iron barricades and unprotected railings. Some accident footage is spliced in to show that it would be a very bad Idea to hit one of these at freeway speeds. They even talk about the new idea of using barricades filled with crushable material to lessen the impact of a car in a collision. Guess what? This film has so many good ideas of sensible impact-reducing roadway design that after watching it I haven't seen a single example of a booby-trap on my modern day travels. Maybe the right people were watching this one and took heed some thirty years ago. Whew, that was close! Very cold, clinical and without the gore or unintended camp value that usually makes old films like this watchable.
| Yucko/Neato Factor: The first one hit me in the head as it pulled out my heart. The three other features were just pro-social prattle, barely worthy of the garish Ed "Big Daddy" Roth inspired cover art. |
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| Production Values: Dtandard educational drivers ed films from decades ago where crashes are simulated by overturning a junked vehicle with a crane, spinning the tires, turning on the cameras and having accident victims laying all over the set groan incoherently yet somehow in unison. |
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| Realism: I still can't get the dead infant out of my nightmares. I'm fucking serious. Don't laugh. |
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| Value for Price: The perfect niche gift for a retired bus driver or recently arrested drunk driver in your life. More moderate audiences may not want this sort of thing. Picture the Pixar animated feature CARS and think of the biggest possible ideological opposite of that. |
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| Plot: Instructional Shock Video. It fills your head with new knowledge while it empties your stomach of your last school lunch. |
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