Stephen King Week: Maximum Overdrive

Welcome back fans of horror to Day 4 of Stephen King Week.  This time around the writer, director and main producer all saw eye to eye on the project but there are some that say our next flick wasn't all it could have been.   Some blame the story, others blame the director but at the end of the day the writer and director are one and the same.  Yes, Stephen King himself helmed our next installment for better or worse.  This is Maximum Overdrive.

I'll get you, Spider-Man!

Man at Cashpoint: Honey! C'mon over here, Sugar-buns.  This machine just called me a spoiler!





Based on the short story Trucks our story unfurls with a strange bombardment of radiation via a stray comet passing over the planet causing our very machines to go completely crackers and start attacking people left and right.   There is no limit to this up-rise; from remote control cars to a vicious soda machine firing cans at the speed of a baseball pitching machine, technology has gone berserk.

In the town of Wilmington North Carolina is the base of our story around the Dixie Boy Truck Stop, when the first sign of insurrection is a gas pump spraying full octane diesel RIGHT IN HIS EYES!!!!   Yeah gonna need more than Visine for that.  Parolee Bill Robinson (Emilo Estevez of The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Young Guns, Men at Work, Freejack and Mission: Impossible) discovers at his first day as a fry cook his boss Hendershot (Pat Hingle of Invitation to a Gunfighter, Hang 'Em High, Sudden Impact, All the Way Home, Batman and The Quick and the Dead) will have Bill clock in for 7 hours but work 9.  No overtime and he keeps a nice percentage.  If Bill doesn't like it he can always go back to prison.   One of the waitresses is tending to orders when the carving knife attacks her and they find that odd but go on with their day.

Damn Pinto breaks!!!

Meanwhile a little league game is under way and the coach is springing for sodas for the whole team when it hurls sodas at a fast clip, pummeling him to death.  A runaway steamroller crashes onto the field squashing a one of the boys and keeps moving on.  Young Deke Keller (Holter Graham of Hairspray, Fly Away Home, Six Ways to Sunday, Veronika Decides to Die and Offspring) hightails it on his BMX.   No sooner this insanity is underway that a hitchhiker Brett (Laura Harrington of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Linda, Dead Air and The Devil's Advocate) is catching a ride with a crude Bible salesman which ended in her fleeing for her life as the car got smashed and the sleaze getting smacked down by said vehicle.

Our savvy truck stop workers realize something is amiss and should look to defending themselves.  Hendershot is apparently a believer in stockpiling his Second Amendment to the level of L.A.W. rockets, assault weapons, SMGs and a helping of sidearms.  Will our trapped cast be able to fend off the relentless machines in order to escape or has the tables turned and the machines are now our masters?

Now some neat trivia about the movie itself.   The main truck Goblin fabrication is based oddly enough on Marvel Comics' Green Goblin.  AC/DC doing the soundtrack was King's idea and frankly they set the tone very well.  Throughout the shoot, the remote control trucks would break down and no sooner repaired when another truck would go belly up as well.

One scene called for a child dummy rigged with fake blood to be mauled by the steamroller but the censors of the MPAA and Christian Moralition threw conniptions and the scene had to be edited out.  When asked if King will ever direct again, he simply points out his first directorial and leaves it at that.

How's my driving? 1-800-MAIM.