Having seen his
best-selling stories turned into such infamously turgid movie franchises
as Pet Sematary (see: Anthony
Edwards), Sometimes They
Come Back (see: Hilary Swank) and Children of
the Corn (see: Eva
Mendes,
Charlize Theron, Naomi Watts),
Stephen King eventually decided that if everyone else was transforming
his prose into cinematic shitpiles, then
why shouldn't he have a go as well? And seeing as the clock was running
out on the box office appeal of Emilio Estevez, why not drag him along
for
good
measure?
Thus the human
race was blessed with Maximum Overdrive, directed by King himself,
and adapted by his own fair hand from his short story,
Trucks.
That totally awesome title should give you some clue as to just how
daft the premise is – the Earth passes through the tail of a
comet and, for no apparent reason, every mechanical device on the planet
springs
into autonomous and malevolent life. Including lots and lots of trucks.
This fanciful notion is established within the opening minutes as a
cash machine calls a customer (played by King himself) an asshole,
a swing
bridge opens by itself causing mayhem on the highway and – in one
of the film’s more memorable moments – a vending machine
wipes out a Little League baseball team by bombarding them with high
velocity cans of soda.
The lofty concept duly explained, we head over to the Dixie Boy truck
stop in North Carolina where Emilio Estevez is busy practising a truly
terrible good ol’ boy Southern accent. He plays Bill, a short order
cook forced to work free overtime by his tyrannical boss, Bubba, who
holds his employees – all of whom are ex-cons on probation - to
ransom with the threat of revoked parole.
After a few curious incidents in which an electric kitchen knife takes
a slice out of the waitress, and the videogame cabinets electrocute
a customer, things step up a notch when the trucks in the parking lot
finally
roar into life and lay siege to the place. Also trapped by the leering
lorries are a foul-mouthed bible salesman, a tough-but-sexy female
hitchhiker, two newlyweds, the sole surviving kid from the Little League
Coke massacre
and an assortment of utterly anonymous sweaty redneck types to act
as cannon fodder for the rampaging roadhogs.
Stretching its already slender premise to breaking point, the movie
then contrives several nonsensical reasons for characters to run out
of the
safety of the building and into harm’s way, while struggling to
remain consistent with its own idiotic logic. After several minor characters
have been gruesomely squashed – usually because they run in a straight
line in front of the trucks, rather than taking advantage of their hardly-nimble
50 foot turning circle – Bubba reveals that, for no real reason,
he’s got a basement full of heavy artillery including a rocket
launcher and grenades. They take out several of the trucks in this manner
and then…go back inside.
As the trucks begin to run low on fuel, an Army wagon rolls up with
a machine gun mounted on the back and informs the fleshy humans – via
morse code, no less – that if they don’t refuel the trucks,
they’ll all be shot. It then shoots some of them anyway, just
to punctuate the point.
Quite why the rocket launcher – or any of the other weapons in
the basement - hasn’t sprung into similar sentient life is, unsurprisingly,
glossed over with yet more vehicular murder. Indeed, despite the mysterious
force taking control of everything from lawnmowers to light aircraft
to ice cream trucks, there are several cars in the movie which remain
inexplicably (yet conveniently) unaffected.
Eventually, having presumably grown tired of being bossed around by
machines despite having the means to fight back all along, the humans – led,
of course, by Emilio – make a break for it, and escape in a good
old-fashioned sailboat to a nearby island, devoid of technology.
A closing caption then explains, in laudably random fashion, that a
UFO was later destroyed in space by a Russian satellite, as if that
information
somehow explains or justifies 90 minutes of incoherent truck terror.
Need to know: The eminently punchable role of greasy hillbilly stereotype
Bubba was taken by Pat Hingle, probably best known as Commisioner Gordon
in the Tim Burton Batman movies. The anonymous customer zapped by the
arcade machines was played by Giancarlo Esposito, a great character
actor whose regular work with directors like Bryan Singer, Michael
Mann and
Spike Lee (in films such as The Usual Suspects, Ali and Malcolm X)
is balanced out with work in TV movie schlock like Chupacabra Terror.
The
part of Connie, the annoyingly nasal newlywed, was played by Yeardley
Smith. Her voice will be more than familiar to most people – she’s
the voice of Lisa Simpson.
Honourable mentions: In 1983 Estevez also appeared in Nightmares, a
horror anthology, as a young man playing a deadly videogame. There
followed
the punk rock weirdness of Repo Man, and then The Breakfast Club and
St Elmo’s Fire rocketed him to fame as one of the Brat Pack. Maximum
Overdrive marked, quite conclusively, the end of Emilio’s run at
the top of the box office and in recent years, his acting output has
been sporadic at best – with an unbilled cameo in the first Mission
Impossible movie (which ends with him being skewered by a rogue elevator)
the cinematic highlight. He recently went behind the camera to write
and direct Bobby, a drama about the assassination of Robert Kennedy starring
Anthony Hopkins. The two are, of course, old sparring partners ever since
Hopkins tried to steal Emilio’s body in Freejack (see: Anthony
Hopkins).
Availability: Maximum Overdrive can be found on DVD.
