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.

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.

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.

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.
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