Maximum Overdrive

Dir: Stephen King

1986

*****

There are many people, including stars Emilio Estevez and Yeardley Smith and writer/director Stephen King, who will tell you 1986’s Maximum Overdrive is a bad movie. They are wrong, so very very wrong. Maximum Overdrive was one of my first horror movies, a silly adaption of a very Stephen King-style story, that was directed by Stephen King himself. I can see why he was disappointed in himself when many of his works have been adapted into revered masterpieces (although he himself stated he hated The Shining – the greatest adaptation of his work thus far) but the truth is that Maximum Overdrive is one of those quintessential little 80s films that were ridiculously good, very silly and very much of their time. I can see youngsters not quite getting it nowadays but at the time this was the sort of film we lived for. The screenplay was inspired by and loosely based on King's short story "Trucks", which was included in King's first collection of short stories, Night Shift. He commented at the time that he decided to direct the film himself after several adaptations made by others because he wanted to see Stephen King done right. Strange really, as by that point Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Cujo, The Dead Zone, Christine, Firestarter and Children of the Corn had been made and all of them had been well received and are now considered classics. I love King’s short stories, Trucks being one of my favourites. As the Earth passes through the tail of a comet,peviously inanimate machines suddenly spring to life and turn homicidal. In a pre-title scene, a man (King in a cameo) tries to withdraw money from an ATM, but it instead calls him an "asshole", and he complains to his wife (King's real life wife Tabitha). A bascule bridge inexplicably raises during heavy traffic, resulting in all vehicles upon the bridge at the point of elevation either falling into the river, or gradually colliding together as they rapidly collect towards the bridge base, resulting in multiple injuries and fatalities. Soon chaos begins as machines of all kinds come to life and begin assaulting humans. At a roadside truck stop just outside Wilmington, North Carolina, a employee, Duncan Keller, is blinded after a gas dispenser sprays diesel in his eyes. A waitress is injured by an electric knife, and arcade machines in the back room electrocute another victim. Employee and ex-convict Bill Robinson (Emilio Estevez) begins to suspect something is wrong. Meanwhile, at a Little League game, a vending machine kills the coach by firing canned soda point-blank into his groin then to his skull.

 A diverless steamroller flattens one of the fleeing children, but Deke Keller (Duncan's son) manages to escape on his bike. A newly-wed couple, Connie (Yeardley Smith) and Curtis (John Short), stop at a gas station, where a brown tow truck tries to kill Curtis, but he and Connie escape in their car. Deke rides through his town as humans and even pets are brutally killed by lawnmowers, chainsaws, electric hair dryers, pocket radios, and remote controlled cars. A driverless ice cream van begins to stalk Deke, but he hides from the truck in the bushes until a lawn mower is after him as he gets back on his bicycle. Back at the truck stop, a red trash truck runs over Duncan and hits the car that belongs to the Bible salesman who gets run down by a black Western Star 4800 sporting a giant Green Goblin mask on its grille. Later, all the big rig trucks roar to life, led by the Happy Toyz (Green Goblin) truck, and surround the truck stop, trapping the rest of the humans inside the diner. Meanwhile on the main highway, Connie and Curtis are chased by a truck, but they make it crash off the side of the road. Curtis suggests that they should call the police from the truck stop, only to find it surrounded by trucks. The two try to drive into the parking lot through a gap between the trucks, but the car is hit and flips over. Bill and Brett (Laura Harrington), a hitchhiker who came in with the Bible salesman, rush out to help them, but the trucks attempt to attack them. Bill's boss Hendershot (Pat Hingle) uses M72 LAW rockets he had stored in a bunker hidden under the diner to destroy many of the trucks. Deke makes it to the truck stop later that evening and tries to get in via the sewers, but can't due to the wire mesh covering the opening. That night, the survivors hear screaming from the Bible salesman in a ditch, and Bill and Curtis sneak out to help him by climbing through the sewers. Deke finds the Bible salesman and thinks he's dead, but he suddenly jumps up and attacks Deke. Bill and Curtis rescue Deke, and a truck chases them back into the pipe. The next morning, a Caterpillar D7G bulldozer and a M274 Mule drive through the diner. Hendershot uses the rocket launcher to blow the bulldozer away. The Mule fires its post-mounted M60 machine gun into the building, killing several including Hendershot and the waitress when she drunkenly rants at them. The Mule then demands, via sending morse code signals through its horn that Deke deciphers, that the humans pump the trucks' diesel for them in exchange for keeping them alive. The survivors soon realize they have become enslaved by their own machines. Robinson suggests they escape to a local island just off the coast, on which no vehicles or machines are permitted. During a fueling operation, Robinson sneaks a grenade onto the Mule vehicle, destroying it, then leads the party out of the diner via a sewer hatch to the main road just as the trucks demolish the entire truck stop. The survivors are pursued to the docks by the Green Goblin truck. The survivors try to hide behind a diner, but an electronic menu blares "Humans Here" until Deke uses a machine gun to destroy the sign. The same ice cream truck that stalked Deke barrels toward them, but Curtis and Brett destroy it with machine guns. The team makes it the docks, and the Green Goblin truck follows them, managing to kill Brad the trucker after he steals a large diamond ring from a female corpse in a car. Robinson destroys the truck once and for all with a direct hit from an M72 LAW rocket shot. The survivors then sail off to safety. A title card epilogue explains that two days later, a UFO was destroyed by a Soviet "weather satellite" conveniently equipped with class IV nuclear missiles and a laser cannon. Six days later, the Earth passes out of the comet's tail, and the survivors are still survivors. The film was the first to be made by Embassy Pictures after it had been bought by the great Dino de Laurentiis. King has since admitted that he was "coked out of his mind all through its production, and he really didn't know what he was doing". He convinced his favourite band, AC/DC, to write music for the film by singing their entire album to them. They were shocked and humbled (and probably coked up too) and agreed on the spot. The premise is nonsense but the stuff of ‘what if’ gold. It is more comedy then horror but the scene whereby the young baseball player is run over by a steamroller absolutely terrified me as a kid. Children didn’t usually die in horror films, so I was shocked to the core. It’s still a notorious scene now. Stephen King requested that the SFX department place a bag of fake blood near the dummy of a young player who would be run over by it. The desired effect would be that a smear of blood would appear on the steamroller and be re-smeared on the grass over and over, like a printing press. While filming the scene, however, the bag of blood exploded too soon and sprayed everywhere, making it appear as if the boy's head had also exploded. King was thrilled with the results, but at the time censors demanded the shot be cut. The ‘coked’ King made some great decisions while high as a kite, although many mistakes were made and Armando Nannuzzi, the director of photography, actually lost his eye in one of several accidents on set. It bombed at the box office and was nominated for many Razzies (the dumbest awards show after the Oscars) and poor old Emilio Estevez was ridiculed specifically. I don’t get it, and while it would have been fascinating if King had landed his first choice of lead – Bruce Springsteen – I loved Estevez’s performance. Maybe people took it too seriously, I’m not sure, people are stupid like that, but I adore the film and will not have a bad word said about it.