MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE shows something Stephen King is bad at
There's a reason they're called Constant Readers, not Constant Viewers.
Some bad movies, you wish were better. For other bad movies, goodness would ruin their entire appeal.
Maximum Overdrive, the sole feature film to be directed by Stephen King, is bad. That’s not a hot take; that’s been the general consensus since its 1986 release. Based on King’s short story “Trucks,” the movie is remembered largely for its AC/DC soundtrack, the grinning Green Goblin on one of its demonic vehicles, and the fact that King was, by his own admission, “coked out of my mind” while making the film.
I recently watched Maximum Overdrive for my first time and can confirm that, yes, from a quality perspective, it’s awful. There’s no style. The plot is a mess. The characters are wafer thin. And, perhaps worst of all for a movie resting so heavily on the Stephen King pedigree, not a single moment is scary.
And yet, its badness elevates it to a strange level of enjoyability. The worse it gets, the harder I cackled. The more weird ideas were tossed out of King’s drug-fueled brain, the more I enjoyed it. It’s an awful movie; it’s also an awful lot of fun if you’re in the right mindset.
A title card informs us early on that Earth is passing through the tail of a comet. Some sort of radiation or stardust or whatever affects all of the planet’s machinery so that it comes to life, with an intense dislike for humans. ATMs insult their users. Drawbridges randomly rise and cause cars to plummet into the rivers. A soda machine beans a Little League coach in the balls with a can of pop and then brains him with a Coke while he’s double-over. Shortly after, a steamroller takes to the ballfield and pancakes a kid.
This is all within the first 15 or 20 minutes of the movie, and it’s delivered with a deranged, sweaty energy that the rest of the film never matches. The first thing we see after the title card is a bank sign flashing “f**k you” at its customers; the first face we see is King himself being told “you are an asshole” by an ATM. Shortly after, the film switches to the vehicular melee on the drawbridge, where chaos reigns; there’s one shot where watermelon randomly break free of a truck and smash through people’s windshields.
King spends what I have to assume was much of the $9 million budget (presumably before cocaine and beer purchases) on a 10-minute opening sequence that allows him to crash cars, crush heads and indulge in a bit of vehicular mayhem, all to the sound of AC/DC guitar licks. I’m not sure I can quite call it a good scene, but I wouldn’t call it boring. It’s a weird mixture of slapstick gags that then turn gory without ever being scary. The sequence on the escalating bridge is meant to be a moment of terror, but then King spends several seconds watching watermelon splatter on cars. It’s not intentionally funny enough to make me laugh, and the gore and mayhem are never delivered with enough skill to make me scared. But I definitely genuinely enjoyed watching the mayhem play out.
Unfortunately, the entire film can’t match the chaotic energy and instead hews closely to the short story, following a group of survivors holed up in the Dixie Boy Truck Stop as they try to wait out the killer semis that have them trapped. There’s the hero, Bill (Emilio Estevez), a cook on a prison-release program, working for the good ol’ boy truck stop owner, Bubba (Pat Hingle). There’s the young woman Brett (Laura Harrington) , a hitchhiker who takes a shine to Bill. There’s an assorted team of diner patrons and sleazeballs, and a newlywed couple that seems to have ventured in from a Dukes of Hazzard episode, one of them is played by Yeardley Smith who, in the moments when she isn’t screaming at the top of her lungs – of which there aren’t many – gives us a taste of what Lisa Simpson would sound like if she were from Alabama.
Of all the adaptations for King to make his directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive is a weird one. While we’re probably lucky that he never stepped behind the camera again, King’s shown himself more than capable as a screenwriter; Pet Sematary’s script captures novel’s the sense of dread and obsession with death in a way that anyone who was not the author of the original source material would probably dilute. Creepshow hits that mix of ghoulish humor that Maximum Overdrive seems to be aiming for. And “Trucks” isn’t even of King’s more memorable short stories; hell, it’s not even in the top tier of King’s stories to deal with sentient killer vehicles – on any given day, it easily ranks behind Christine, From a Buick 8 and probably even the killer truck story, “Uncle Otto’s Truck.”
And yet, the themes and ideas he’s returned to throughout his literary career are present. He’s always been fascinated by groups of individuals with nothing in common who suddenly have to work together to survive an unimaginable situation (what is the Dixie Boy but a deep-fried Southern version of the grocery store from The Mist, with the trucks diesel-chugging demons instead of the Lovecraftian monsters that come from the fog?). He’s always had a knack for clashing incomprehensible horrors up against the familiar. And he’s often been leery of the power of technology, curious of what would happen if the things we created turned on us. In the right hands, maybe there’s something here.
But these are King’s hands. And as skilled as they might be at a word processor, they’re pretty bad behind a camera (King has admitted as much; he owns his failure with this – and honestly, the guy is so good at so many other things, it’s kind of nice to see him fumble for a change).
One of King’s strengths in print is his ability to craft memorable characters. Estevez is fine as Bill, and I like the sweet romance he strikes up with Brett. But King’s idea of characterization for everyone else seems to have been to direct them to go as loud as they can. Hingle whoops it up like a good ol’ Southern boy transplanted from Canon Ball Run. There’s a Bible salesman whose sole personality trait is his skeeviness. There are apparently about a dozen people in the Dixie Boy, but most feel like glorified extras (there’s a shot where about six people walk out into the parking lot late in the film and I genuinely was surprised there were that many character in this film). It’s not just that the characters are wafer thin, but that they’re loud, annoying caricatures that are nearly impossible to like. And King’s musings about the dangers of technology don’t go much deeper than having a truck stop waitress run outside several times, hysterically screaming “we made you” over and over until she’s finally mowed down by an Army gun on wheels.
Now, I don’t go into a movie about killer trucks hoping for sociological insight. If these people just existed to be fodder for King to dispatch in increasingly bizarre and gruesome ways, that might be okay. But once the movie settles in at the Dixie Boy, the trucks don’t do much more than drive around in circles, maybe occasionally running someone over, but mostly just idling. There’s a sort-of interesting stretch where they make Bill and the others fill up seemingly endless convoy of trucks, but that just made me think “why doesn’t everyone just run somewhere the trucks can’t get to and let them run out of gas?”
Because they easily could. Many of the film’s big action sequences are solved just by telling someone to jump out of the way. After all, these aren’t sleek, turn-on-a-dime vehicles (the film’s rules are very spotty in regard to what is and isn’t affected by the comet dust). They’re loud and they lumber around; unless you’re Steven Spielberg, it’s pretty hard to make a semi truck scary (the Green Goblin mask on one at least gives it a personality). And the truck’s aren’t unstoppable. When the survivors locate a rocket launcher Bubba has stored in his basement (for…reasons?), they easily take out a few. And the film’s climax just involves Estevez turning around and firing a missile at the Green Goblin…it’s surprisingly easy for them to get away.
And yet, despite (or because of) the film’s stupidity, I can’t say I hated it. The film’s AC/DC score is a weird choice, but it gooses the several montages, and I cackled every time a death was punctuated by an electric guitar sting, like a dive bar band scoring Psycho. There’s a sequence where a kid bikes through town and observes the bloody aftermath of a vehicle attack that is amusingly gruesome and hints at a potentially more interesting movie on a bigger budget. There are a few gnarly kills here and there, delivered with a childish glee that fuels some of King’s nastier tales. And in an age where CGI and The Volume have replaced most real-life on-screen destruction, it’s fun to watch big trucks tear down an entire truck stop in the finale. And, I have to admit, I laughed quite a bit when the film got to the end and just gave up trying to explain anything, settling instead on a title card to tell us that, the next day, the Russians shot down a UFO and a few days later, everything was fine.
Maximum Overdrive is a bad movie, but the type of bad movie I could see enjoying with the right friends and the right refreshments. For King fans, it’s probably essential to view at least once to prove that the master is fallible. I doubt I’ll ever watch it again, at least alone and sober, but I guess I’m okay with having had one stop at the Dixie Boy.
More entries in 2023’s Stephen King Halloween marathon