I hate you, Stephen King.

I love you too, but… oh, such hate.

Ok, that aside, let’s talk about Maximum Overdrive for a few minutes.

Maximum Overdrive is the King Super Special of Sundays with Stephen. Stephen King wrote the original story the movie is based on, ‘Trucks’.

He adapted it for the screen here.

He directed the movie.

He also acts in it (a cameo role)

So, in a way, this is the ultimate Sunday with Stephen movie.

Pity it’s so irredeemably awful. Though, on watching it this time, I think I hate it less than Cat’s Eye.

Ok, Maximum Overdrive starts off with a goofy bit of text about how a comet, Rhea-M, has passed through the solar system and the Earth will be drifting through its very diffuse tail for about a week. The opening then shows machines starting to run amok in a city somewhere, and uh-oh, it’s a killer comet movie!

Not Deep Impact style though. This time, it’s the machines that disobey.

We’re introduced to a motley cast of characters in Wilmington, North Carolina, which showed up in Cat’s Eye as Drew Barrymore’s troll-infested hometown too, so presumably she got killed by an EZ Bake Oven or something in this movie and we just didn’t see it. (world building!)

We have truckers, mechanics, a waitress, a cook played with precisely one emotion by Emilio Estevez, who really needs to get a new line of work, I’m sorry. There’s a kid whose father is one of the mechanics, and is isolated from the rest of the group because he’s at a Little League game when the world of machines goes mad, and a Coke machine kills his coach. With supernaturally forceful coke can ejections.

Riiight.

We need to talk about the machines here for a moment, because half the fun, and half the pain, of this film is the completely inconsistent way this mechanized uprising occurs. It’s established that any electrically powered or directed device can be possessed by the… whatever it’s supposed to be. But at one point a bicycle seemingly turns on its owner, while throughout the film, cars fail to turn against the humans. This baffles me a bit. Cars are loyal to man, but trucks aren’t, and bicycles are ambivalent, despite having no electrical devices onboard?

We see people killed, or apparently killed, by a wide variety of gizmos, including at one point a person who was seemingly killed by a Walkman.

How could a WALKMAN kill anyone? They can’t even electrocute you, they used.. well, presumably AAs mostly. But small batteries. Not nearly the juice to off a person (and it was covered in blood, so… what, did it grow teeth?)

Anyway. Things at the truck stop go from bad to worse just as another pair of characters, a sleazy bible salesman and his hitchhiker passenger, arrive for a pit stop. Trucks, it seems, are out for blood!

Duh-duh-DUHHHH

Especially the truck decked out like the Green Goblin from Spiderman, with light up red eyes and a big shit-eating grin. I guess it’s supposed to be scary, but it’s not even clown-scary. It’s just doofy.

Yeah. It really goes downhill from there. A bunch of people get trapped in the truck stop; it turns out the owner has the guns and ammo stockpile of a mid-sized white supremacist group, but no one thinks to use it to escape, beyond taking potshots with a bazooka; the kid continues a little cross-country journey to meet up with his dad, Emilio tries to hook up with hitchhike gal, etc.

There’s the core of a scary movie here, but it’s hard to see through the layers of bad acting and hamfisted comedy King piles on like a rotten layer cake. Some of the scenes where the boy, what’s his face, is traveling through deserted neighborhoods, hiding from malevolent sentient vehicles, etc… they’re creepy. Unsettling. You get a last man on earth vibe there, and for those segments you’re in another movie, one that doesn’t suck. Then you’re back at the Dixie Boy truck stop watching a bunch of inbred halfwits forget they have the firepower to take out their oppressors, remember the bazooka and stockpile of guns, forget, remember, etc, until the trucks plan the next stage in their assault.

What. The. Fuck. I get that this is the Deep South, ok. There are some truly blighted pockets of humanity in the southeast. Even I draw the line at this crew of morons, however. How many times do they need to kill a truck in a huge fireball before they realize that they can kill a truck – in a huge fireball? Did they get rid of pattern recognition after Reconstruction? (It would explain the idiots who want to fight the Civil War again, at least).

Fifteen minutes from the end the movie realizes it needs an ending, and so they concoct a lameass escape plan to reach a mythical island called, of course, Haven, a place where motor vehicles are banned. Nevermind that we’ve seen electric knives and walkmen attack people, so vehicles aren’t the only source of concern, or for that matter, that cars are still loyal to Homo Sapiens. Haven’s the place to be, and fortunately, our, ahem, lead character, in addition to being a short order cook/parolee/college graduate (which is a huge deal at the Dixie Boy), is also an experience sailor.

Seriously. If they’d needed a bricklayer it would have turned out he spent a summer doing that, too. He’s the Swiss Army Knife of useless fucktardery.

So of course there’s an escape, and revenge on trucks, blah blah, ending sequence with a shitty exposition box to wrap it up.

Gag me.

Still, it’s not as choppy and repulsive as Cat’s Eye, which was three bad movies pressed into one traumatic experience. So there is that.

According to the Wikipedia, this film has a bit of a tragic history to it, with two stunts going seriously awry, and a man losing his eye to a bad remote controlled lawnmower setup.

It also says that a ton of gore was cut from the film to avoid an X rating. Gore might help leaven the broad comedy, actually. It could have a sort of Grand Guignol humor to it if it was gruesome enough.

According to TNT one of the pulled effects was so gruesome it made George Romero vomit, which implies a seriously awesome effect that I’d like to see someday.

At any rate, that’s about it for Maximum Overdrive here on Sundays with Stephen. I’ve come to think of this film a bit like a childhood immunization: the dread was worse than the pain, and it might make me stronger when I need to weather later bad films. Like Dreamcatcher. I’ve heard… unkind things.

Next Week: Stand By Me, starring Will Wheaton and some other, less nerdy people
Last Week: Silver Bullet, starring Gary Busey and a bucket of crazy.