Reviews of film ephemera, including such things as educational films, industrial films, military and propaganda films, tv commercials, movie trailers, shorts, experimental films, and movies made for non-mainstream audiences.
Another weeper of a driver’s ed film. A guy who was killed in an auto accident comes back as a ghost and watches his wife sell his favorite chair to a couple of old biddies for 35 bucks. Then he tells us all about the accident. Apparently, after taking an extensive defensive driving course given by his employer, the Bell System, and preaching to his family endlessly about safe driving, he gets himself killed when he breaks one of his own rules, which frankly doesn’t speak too well for the driving course. Of course, he does live in a town where the driver’s are all universally terrible and you can count on seeing an accident every few miles. And you gotta wonder when the guy does an elaborate check on all his car’s lights before driving, but doesn’t have his family fasten their seat belts. The film ends with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the guy’s wife when their little boy dies in the hospital. It’s a good thing she’s clueless about the fact that the old biddies who bought her husband’s chair were the very ones who caused the accident in the first place. The first part of the film is pretty campy, the middle part with the driver training course is boring (though I want the magnetic road board and the magnetic cars for the Film Ephemera Museum of Quirky Devices), and the end is tear-jerking. No gore in this one, but the opening credits end by smashing into the windshield, just as if you are in your very own accident.
