Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Stephen King
"This machine just called me an asshole!"
I'm a big fan of Stephen King. He's come up with some of the best horror stories in history, and wrote one of my favorite books of all time, The Stand. I love how unhinged he was, especially early on in his career. He wrote his first novel, Carrie, while locked up in a mobile home, drinking and doing coke for weeks. He had to plug his nose with wadded up toilet paper to stop bleeding all over the typewriter. He's a true mad genius.
He was also a bit eccentric. In many of his novels, King uses a lot of autobiographical elements. The Shining is great example. King was a desperate alcoholic, resented his family, and worked as a school teacher while wanting to be a novelist. He imagined having to be locked up with his wife and child in total seclusion, thought about the strain that would cause to him, and The Shining was born.
When Stanley Kubrick, another insane genius, bought the rights to adapt the novel into a film, he would pester King constantly, once calling King at 2 AM to ask him if he believed in God. This, along with Kubrick removing Jack's redemption from the story, left a bad taste in King's mouth, and he has always openly expressed his disappointment in a film that I consider to be the finest film ever made.
Maybe that's what inspired King to try and tackle filmmaking himself, because in 1986 he decided to direct the film adaptation of his short story Trucks, about murderous, self-driving big rigs. Powered by an insane amount of cocaine and with absolutely no directorial skill whatsoever, he thrust Maximum Overdrive onto the world in 1986.
It's such a weird balls-to-the-wall style movie. Instead of buying a cheap derelict truckstop in the middle of nowhere, the production built one from the ground up, just so that they could tear it down during filming. There are so many big stunts and crazy explosions, and at least a dozen semis are blown to bits. The coke-fueled filmmaking was also a threat to life and limb. During one shot, a remote controlled lawnmower went rogue and ran over a chunk of wood, sending a splinter into the Director of Photography's eye (which he lost). In another scene, a cameraman was almost crushed by an ice cream truck, after the attempt to flip it over went awry. He was pulled away at the last second. Insanity from top to bottom.
King also managed to get AC/DC to provide the entire soundtrack for the film. I'm not entirely sure how he pulled it off, but they produced both original tracks and allowed use of their classics. It's not exactly an inappropriate soundtrack, but it does lend a certain goofiness when watching it in 2017. AC/DC has long since traveled down the long, dusty road toward grandpa rock, and hearing Hell's Bells blaring against the backdrop of possessed trucks crushing bible salesmen in a truckstop parking lot makes the whole thing extra silly.
The story is completely ridiculous. We get some expositional text at the beginning to tell us that a passing comet has left Earth shrouded in the mysterious energy of its tail for 8 days. The strange space energy causes machines on the planet to develop their own autonomous personalities, ranging from petty jerks to homicidal maniacs.
This is such a great way to introduce the kind of craziness we're heading toward:
The rest of the story, like most Stephen King stories, focuses on a small group of disparate characters holed up together in an everyday place, trying to survive an inexplicable crisis. In this case, everyone's hiding in a backwoods truckstop in North Carolina run by a cigar chomping good ol' boy named Bubba. The crew is mostly truckers, but there's also a waitress, a couple of pump jockeys, and line-cook Bill (played by Emilio Estevez). As the story develops, we're also introduced to a young boy and a newly married couple (the new bride played by Yeardley Smith, better known as Lisa Simpson) who are also trying to escape the terror.
Obviously the trucks are the main villain of Maximum Overdrive, but the film makes it clear that every machine is capable of being affected by the comet's energy. A waitress is attacked by an electric knife, a man is called an asshole by an ATM, lawn sprinklers go on and off by themselves, and a steamroller attacks a little league game:
This scene was originally supposed to have a bag of blood in the child dummy that would leave a red streak on the roller, but it burst all at once, making it look like the child's head exploded as it was crushed. A coked out Stephen King was delighted by the unexpected result, but the scene didn't survive the censors, and it was cut from the film. You can kind of tell by how quickly that shot ends. It's too bad. That would be an all-timer in schlocky 80's B-horror deaths.
My favorite death in the movie is when the little league coach is killed via pop machine:
The kids trying to get away from the pop cans with some getting mowed down is just outstanding.
I can suspend disbelief for certain machines, but some just don't make any sense whatsoever. Like, how do sprinklers go on and off by themselves? They're not machines. How does a hair dryer strangle a woman to death? The rest of the machines that come to life are still bound by the limits of Earthly physics, but that one clearly had the ability to wrap itself tightly around her neck. And some machines just never come to life. The car that the married couple are driving in never goes crazy, despite ample opportunities to kill them. Bubba's car, which is parked right in front of the truckstop, also never wakes up, and is later destroyed by a maniac bulldozer. The machines also somehow figure out how to mount a machine gun onto a golf cart and use that to murder and terrorize the survivors. There's no cohesiveness to the central conceit of the movie.
The movie tries to imply that there's a collective intelligence to the machines, as Emilio Estevez whispers to one of the trucks about all the diesel he can give them, and trucks from all over line up to get refueled. The movie plays fast and loose with the rules, and every plot point is just another excuse to film a blood-filled dummy getting rammed by a Mack truck. Like King said himself, this is definitely a moron movie.
Led by Bill, our characters have the bright idea to make a run for the marina, so they can steal a sailboat and head for a small island off the coast of North Carolina that doesn't allow motorized vehicles (like Mackinac Island, I guess). They make a mad dash to the shore, defeat a possessed ice cream truck in the most anti-climactic climax in history, and board the sailboat. The original script had our heroes fighting off a motorized Coast Guard boat with mounted weaponry, but that was cut out in favor of...this:
What? UFO? Soviet weather satellite? Laser cannon? Nothing about what happened to the machines? Was the UFO controlling all the trucks? This is so confusing.
Either the money ran out, or the coke did, because Maximum Overdrive has the most absurdly abrupt ending since this:
Why not just end the movie with the characters being run over by an ocean freighter? Or just end it with the sailboat heading into the sunset. Anything but a nonsensical postscript.
But maybe that adds to the strange charm of Maximum Overdrive, right? It wouldn't be a hilarious schlock-filled B-movie without something truly incompetent, and the ending definitely qualifies.
Summary:
Stephen King says he's ashamed of Maximum Overdrive, but that probably has more to do with his raging addiction than the quality of the film. It's goofy fun and easier to enjoy now than in 1986. If you're jonesing for weird 80's schlock or some pounding dad rock, watch Maximum Overdrive. If you want something like this, only done well, watch Tremors instead.
I'm a big fan of Stephen King. He's come up with some of the best horror stories in history, and wrote one of my favorite books of all time, The Stand. I love how unhinged he was, especially early on in his career. He wrote his first novel, Carrie, while locked up in a mobile home, drinking and doing coke for weeks. He had to plug his nose with wadded up toilet paper to stop bleeding all over the typewriter. He's a true mad genius.
He was also a bit eccentric. In many of his novels, King uses a lot of autobiographical elements. The Shining is great example. King was a desperate alcoholic, resented his family, and worked as a school teacher while wanting to be a novelist. He imagined having to be locked up with his wife and child in total seclusion, thought about the strain that would cause to him, and The Shining was born.
When Stanley Kubrick, another insane genius, bought the rights to adapt the novel into a film, he would pester King constantly, once calling King at 2 AM to ask him if he believed in God. This, along with Kubrick removing Jack's redemption from the story, left a bad taste in King's mouth, and he has always openly expressed his disappointment in a film that I consider to be the finest film ever made.
Maybe that's what inspired King to try and tackle filmmaking himself, because in 1986 he decided to direct the film adaptation of his short story Trucks, about murderous, self-driving big rigs. Powered by an insane amount of cocaine and with absolutely no directorial skill whatsoever, he thrust Maximum Overdrive onto the world in 1986.
It's such a weird balls-to-the-wall style movie. Instead of buying a cheap derelict truckstop in the middle of nowhere, the production built one from the ground up, just so that they could tear it down during filming. There are so many big stunts and crazy explosions, and at least a dozen semis are blown to bits. The coke-fueled filmmaking was also a threat to life and limb. During one shot, a remote controlled lawnmower went rogue and ran over a chunk of wood, sending a splinter into the Director of Photography's eye (which he lost). In another scene, a cameraman was almost crushed by an ice cream truck, after the attempt to flip it over went awry. He was pulled away at the last second. Insanity from top to bottom.
King also managed to get AC/DC to provide the entire soundtrack for the film. I'm not entirely sure how he pulled it off, but they produced both original tracks and allowed use of their classics. It's not exactly an inappropriate soundtrack, but it does lend a certain goofiness when watching it in 2017. AC/DC has long since traveled down the long, dusty road toward grandpa rock, and hearing Hell's Bells blaring against the backdrop of possessed trucks crushing bible salesmen in a truckstop parking lot makes the whole thing extra silly.
King also managed to get AC/DC to provide the entire soundtrack for the film. I'm not entirely sure how he pulled it off, but they produced both original tracks and allowed use of their classics. It's not exactly an inappropriate soundtrack, but it does lend a certain goofiness when watching it in 2017. AC/DC has long since traveled down the long, dusty road toward grandpa rock, and hearing Hell's Bells blaring against the backdrop of possessed trucks crushing bible salesmen in a truckstop parking lot makes the whole thing extra silly.
The story is completely ridiculous. We get some expositional text at the beginning to tell us that a passing comet has left Earth shrouded in the mysterious energy of its tail for 8 days. The strange space energy causes machines on the planet to develop their own autonomous personalities, ranging from petty jerks to homicidal maniacs.
This is such a great way to introduce the kind of craziness we're heading toward:
This is such a great way to introduce the kind of craziness we're heading toward:
The rest of the story, like most Stephen King stories, focuses on a small group of disparate characters holed up together in an everyday place, trying to survive an inexplicable crisis. In this case, everyone's hiding in a backwoods truckstop in North Carolina run by a cigar chomping good ol' boy named Bubba. The crew is mostly truckers, but there's also a waitress, a couple of pump jockeys, and line-cook Bill (played by Emilio Estevez). As the story develops, we're also introduced to a young boy and a newly married couple (the new bride played by Yeardley Smith, better known as Lisa Simpson) who are also trying to escape the terror.
Obviously the trucks are the main villain of Maximum Overdrive, but the film makes it clear that every machine is capable of being affected by the comet's energy. A waitress is attacked by an electric knife, a man is called an asshole by an ATM, lawn sprinklers go on and off by themselves, and a steamroller attacks a little league game:
Obviously the trucks are the main villain of Maximum Overdrive, but the film makes it clear that every machine is capable of being affected by the comet's energy. A waitress is attacked by an electric knife, a man is called an asshole by an ATM, lawn sprinklers go on and off by themselves, and a steamroller attacks a little league game:
This scene was originally supposed to have a bag of blood in the child dummy that would leave a red streak on the roller, but it burst all at once, making it look like the child's head exploded as it was crushed. A coked out Stephen King was delighted by the unexpected result, but the scene didn't survive the censors, and it was cut from the film. You can kind of tell by how quickly that shot ends. It's too bad. That would be an all-timer in schlocky 80's B-horror deaths.
My favorite death in the movie is when the little league coach is killed via pop machine:
The kids trying to get away from the pop cans with some getting mowed down is just outstanding.
I can suspend disbelief for certain machines, but some just don't make any sense whatsoever. Like, how do sprinklers go on and off by themselves? They're not machines. How does a hair dryer strangle a woman to death? The rest of the machines that come to life are still bound by the limits of Earthly physics, but that one clearly had the ability to wrap itself tightly around her neck. And some machines just never come to life. The car that the married couple are driving in never goes crazy, despite ample opportunities to kill them. Bubba's car, which is parked right in front of the truckstop, also never wakes up, and is later destroyed by a maniac bulldozer. The machines also somehow figure out how to mount a machine gun onto a golf cart and use that to murder and terrorize the survivors. There's no cohesiveness to the central conceit of the movie.
The movie tries to imply that there's a collective intelligence to the machines, as Emilio Estevez whispers to one of the trucks about all the diesel he can give them, and trucks from all over line up to get refueled. The movie plays fast and loose with the rules, and every plot point is just another excuse to film a blood-filled dummy getting rammed by a Mack truck. Like King said himself, this is definitely a moron movie.
Led by Bill, our characters have the bright idea to make a run for the marina, so they can steal a sailboat and head for a small island off the coast of North Carolina that doesn't allow motorized vehicles (like Mackinac Island, I guess). They make a mad dash to the shore, defeat a possessed ice cream truck in the most anti-climactic climax in history, and board the sailboat. The original script had our heroes fighting off a motorized Coast Guard boat with mounted weaponry, but that was cut out in favor of...this:
What? UFO? Soviet weather satellite? Laser cannon? Nothing about what happened to the machines? Was the UFO controlling all the trucks? This is so confusing.
Either the money ran out, or the coke did, because Maximum Overdrive has the most absurdly abrupt ending since this:
Either the money ran out, or the coke did, because Maximum Overdrive has the most absurdly abrupt ending since this:
But maybe that adds to the strange charm of Maximum Overdrive, right? It wouldn't be a hilarious schlock-filled B-movie without something truly incompetent, and the ending definitely qualifies.
Summary:
Stephen King says he's ashamed of Maximum Overdrive, but that probably has more to do with his raging addiction than the quality of the film. It's goofy fun and easier to enjoy now than in 1986. If you're jonesing for weird 80's schlock or some pounding dad rock, watch Maximum Overdrive. If you want something like this, only done well, watch Tremors instead.
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