[Inspector Abberline]

Signal 30 (1959)

“Now comes the nauseating task of removing the shattered hulk of a life that had been lived so little.”
starts with a policeman giving out instructions to a patrol man to attend a crash, signal 30 is code for fatality at a crash. The first crash is a car with 7 people in who fail to stop at a junction and is flattened by a truck carrying cows. We also get an insight into what a state patrol man does on a day to day business. Next up two trucks who hit head on, we get the rather nasty scene of a charred and dead driver being removed from his cab. And on and on it goes, relentlessly the bombardment of either charred cadavers being taken out of cars or rather flattened motorist whose cars have spat them out for them to only land on top of them. If the image of people wrapped around tree posts or trapped by there own steering column wasn't enough how about a lorry driver who is crushed by his own load. Its a pretty grim and relentless barrage of images that does not relent for it 27 mins running time. While Richard Wayman's Signal 30 is undoubtedly gruesome oddity, other rival film makers would up the gore in future driver education films.