As the movie begins, we learn that Earth passed through the tail of a rogue comet on June 19, 1987, where it would remain for just over a week. However, the negative effects of this astrological anomaly are felt almost immediately. Machines of all types — vehicles, appliances, vending machines, even things as mundane as hair dryers, toys, and Walkmen — have become sentient, all of them flying into an anti-human homicidal frenzy.
In the town of Willamette, North Carolina, a group of murderous 18-wheelers have trapped a small handful of survivors inside a roadside truck stop. When the trucks, communicating via Morse code through their horns, demand to be refueled, the humans come to the horrific realization that the machines wish to enslave them.
Billy Robinson (Emilio Estevez), the truck stop's fry cook, tries rallying the survivors. Armed with a cache of weapons his boss kept hidden in the diner's basement, Billy begins formulating a plan to lead them to safety. But with the prevalence of machinery, where would they go that would be safe?
Maximum Overdrive is one of those movies that boasts an awesome concept yet leaves a lot to be desired. I don't want to call it a bad movie per se, but it's just kinda average at best. It's a movie that, if placed in the hands of a writer and director with more experience, would have been awesome.
I still can't believe that Stephen King actually made this movie. I guess he figured if people were going to do movie versions of his work, he might as well join the party and see what all the fuss was about. It's obvious that he'd never made a movie before, as his experience as both a director and a screenwriter shows. His direction isn't that bad, but it feels rough around the edges. He tends to use some of the same camera moves, angles, and techniques over and over, a repetition that gets tiring after a while. (His overuse of that really bad knockoff of the shower music from Psycho doesn't help things either.)
There are a few moments where King shows a little brilliance, though. Specifically, I mean the opening sequence on the bridge and the scene where the soda machine kills the Little League coach. Both of those scenes are awesome, King making the most of them. It's a shame the rest of the movie couldn't be like that, though.
King's script isn't much better. The short story the movie was based on was just that: short. It's roughly ten or fifteen pages long. There was no way King (or anyone else) could turn it into a feature-length movie without a ton of padding or extra material, and that's exactly what happened. The problem is that there's still not enough to carry a 97-minute running time. It just runs out of gas (no pun intended) after a certain point.
It's just really tedious. The lame characters, the stupid dialogue, the scenes that don't go anywhere; they'll just wear you out. Maximum Overdrive would have been a lot more effective as an episode of a horror anthology TV show. It's too late to change that now, but if somebody wants to resurrect Tales from the Crypt or Masters of Horror, a remake of Maximum Overdrive could make for a great episode. But for all of King's successes as a novelist, a screenwriter he is not.
And then there's the cast, which is a bit on the disappointing side. Playing the lead role is Emilio Estevez, whose performance isn't too bad. The role isn't a very strong one, and Estevez doesn't seem to be trying very hard, but at least he's watchable. That's more than I can say for some of the other people in the cast is forgettable. Only a few actors are even worth mentioning at all. One of them is the late Pat Hingle, who is wasted playing such a crummy character. What sucks about Hingle's performance is that he's clearly the wrong guy to be playing a sleazy redneck. If the writing had been a bit better, he wouldn't have been so bad.
And how about Yeardley Smith? She's most famous as the voice of Lisa Simpson, but before The Simpsons had ever been featured on The Tracey Ullman Show, she appeared in Maximum Overdrive. And I honestly wish she hadn't because Smith is terrible. She's nothing short of awful, with the most annoying voice to ever come out of anyone's mouth. Smith can't say more than one syllable without it sounding like a screeching cat, and the fact that her character spends pretty much every scene whining and complaining, it only gets worse as the movie progresses. She's right up there with Dropo from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians on my list of characters who make me want to climb into the movie and strangle them.
At least the movie has an awesome soundtrack courtesy of legendary rock band AC/DC. No less than seven of their songs appear in the movie, with their album Who Made Who serving as the movie's soundtrack. You can't go wrong with AC/DC, so if Maximum Overdrive got one thing right, it's the music.
I might sound like I'm really ripping the movie apart, but Maximum Overdrive isn't that bad. It's still an entertaining B-movie. I mean, it's a movie about a bunch of 18-wheelers that come to life and kill people, and it was directed by Stephen King, for crying out loud. The movie isn't going to be good by any means, but it's pure dumb fun. Though I'm only giving it two and a half stars, I will say that if you enjoy cheesy movies from the '80s, you could do worse than Maximum Overdrive.
Final Rating: **½
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