I saw this movie in jr. high school in the 70s.
I think it had Richard Carlson in it, but I can’t remember. He was killed in a car wreck, and his ghost was at the hospital while his family was there, victims of the same wreck. He was being really, really melodramatic, (of course, he had just died, so I can forgive him). At any rate, the ghost was re-living?? the events that led up to the wreck, and the wreck was caused because 2 old ladies were doing something like 20 mph on a highway, he tried to pass them, and bingo.
SPOILER ALERT:
At the end, his son dies, and I can’t remember much else.
No idea - the driving cautionary tale we got was Red Asphalt III. Brains on the road look a lot like Cheetos, did you know? (And driver’s ed was right before lunch.)
“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You might remember me from such driver’s-ed films as Alice’s Adventures Through the Windshield Glass and The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot.”
Wikipedia tells me that they’ve since made several more Red Asphalt movies, presumably to keep things current for those hip and happening kids. The latest one was 2006. I mean, really? Is the old one really no longer serviceable? (I bet they’re still showing the third one at my alma mater, possibly from a projector.)
It’s hard to resonate with a modern audience when one of your cautionary dramatizations involves a rear-end collision where an unbelted passenger flies through the windshield and into the struck car, being fatally impaled on one of its tailfins.
This all reminds me of the time in 1984 when the State Patrol parked a totaled car in front of my high school with signs indicating it was the result of drunk driving. A few of us were standing around looking at it, and one of the guys said, “If there’s a Maxell tape in this car and it doesn’t work, we’ll replace it.”
I’m really old. Our movie was the classic “Signal 30”. The color close-ups of the mangled car-wreck victims were known to induce nausea in some members of the class, and one girl actually passed out while viewing it!
In my Ohio HS, we didn’t go more than a week without seeing yet another driving safety movie produced by the Ohio Highway Patrol. When I got to school, a guy from Connecticut said all his movies were the same ones. Apparently there was a Cecil B. DeMille wannabe under one of those Smokey hats.
I think this is it, in a nutshell. My class certainly was.
In addition, the picture quality was so bad on some of those old films that you couldn’t tell exactly what it was that you were looking at, ruining the effect. Could be people, could be upholstery, who knows?
When I was in Driver’s Ed here in Kansas(early 1970’s) all our cautionary films were from the Ohio State Patrol! I remember one guy getting up to leave and he passed out before he could get away.
I had never seen any of those drivers’ ed. movies until I was student teaching at a private school. All of the school had to watch the film at the same time. The young man seated in front of me also stood up and then passed out. I’m assuming that most of the highway patrol films show similar things – the results of real accidents.
In general, the development of the human brain is such that it is not fully able to conceive of the meaning of its own death until the person is approximately 16. Films like this can be particularly tough on 9th and 10th graders. (They are not easy on anyone.)
