Maximum Overdrive (1986) Review

Maximum Overdrive (1986) Review

What do you get when you have a movie, written and directed by Stephen King (in his directorial debut) and throw in a soundtrack by AC/DC? You get Maximum Overdrive, a crazy story about machines going haywire and trying to, in the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, “Kill all humans!”  

The movie opens like one of King’s novels, with a paragraph of reading. It explains earth is passing through the tail of a comet, and as it quickly becomes apparent, this makes all the machines on earth come to life. Right from the very opening, the shit hits the fan. Stephen King cameos as some guy going up to an ATM, which calls him an asshole (a nice bit of self-deprecating humour from Mr. King) and it only escalates from there. 

The machines start attacking people—some homicidal big rig trucks in particular have it in for those at a truck stop. The first part of the movie shows lots of different characters all in different places, but they eventually take refuge at said truck stop. The owner has a mini bazooka, and shoots at the trucks every once in a while. Why don’t they just shoot all of the trucks and run away? That’s what I was asking myself. This movie doesn’t make a lot of sense. The trucks can understand people talking, and they are in control of themselves, but it’s not like a supernatural control. They still need to fill up with gas. While that sounds like it should be their weakness, it’s not, because they make the people fill them up.  

When I first heard about this movie, I thought it was going to be awesome. I mean, just look at that combo, Stephen King and AC/DC? This movie should have been something phenomenal, but unfortunately it isn’t. 

Maximum Overdrive is billed as horror, but there’s really nothing scary about it. It’s more in the vein of Creepshow, with a somewhat unsettling premise but a lot of comedy thrown in—some of it intentional, some of it not. The trucks are all standard, except for one, which has this big dumb monster face on the front that looks like The Green Goblin straight out of Spider-Man. 

The main character is Bubba, played by Emilio Estevez, and there are a bunch of odd side characters throughout. My favourite is the kid on the softball team who witnesses his coach’s murder by pop cans shooting out of a vending machine at deadly speeds, then he goes around town on his bike and sees all the different things that have come to life: lawnmowers, sprinklers, vehicles, everything. There’s a newlywed couple, and the bride is insufferable, constantly whining and screaming and just being exaggerated in general. And that’s how most of this movie is: exaggerated. 

There are brief moments of extreme violence, but they come off as funny rather than shocking, and the special effects are pretty substandard. There’s a guy who gets hit by a truck and it makes a huge splatter of blood, then in the next shot he’s totally intact, rolling on the ground, completely bloodless. I guess you could blame stuff like that on Stephen King (who never directed another movie after this), but you can’t really blame him for much when it’s obvious he was just having fun with this movie, and it shows. It’s not trying to be shocking and horrific like Carrie or some serious piece of art like The Shining, it’s just meant to be entertaining. 

On the flipside of that, however, when there isn’t something ridiculous happening, there are attempts at character development, which doesn’t really do much to make them more interesting, and it slows the movie down significantly. The beginning is fine and the ending is fine, but the middle feels merely sprinkled with moments of amusement, amid stretches of boring nothingness. The characters just stay at the truck stop, waiting. It’s like a George Romero zombie movie, only instead of zombies, there are trucks, and instead of being tension-filled, it’s just…not. This could be due to poor pacing or something else like that, but it’s unfortunate, because if not for the dull middle, this movie would’ve been a lot more entertaining overall. 

Do I recommend Maximum Overdrive? I wouldn’t say it’s essential viewing for King fans, but if you’re into dumb 80’s action/horror, then it’s worth checking out. The soundtrack is rockin’, it has moments that are so bad they’re good, and there’s plenty of things that go boom.