Stephen King Month: Maximum Overdrive (Dir Stephen King, 1h 30m, 1986)

The author-directed film is a curate's egg. They sit uneasily in cinema, either the work of authors either famous enough, or frustrated enough to film their own novel, believing they alone are the ones that can bring their work to the screen, or written by directors to drum up support, and generate revenue for, that great leap into cinema. They're also an absolute minefield. For every Tom Stoppard-helmed Rosencrantz and Guilderstein are Dead, there's Frank Miller, utterly unrestrained by Robert Rodriguez, making a mess of Sin City. For every Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984), or Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987), there's an Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty), or, appropriately enough, as we continue our month of King, a Maximum Overdrive.

But whilst so many of these are auterish, if often ill-advised leaps into the unknown from little-known authors or embattled directors, Maximum Overdrive, based upon Stephen King's own 1973 short story, "Trucks", is an altogether weirder beast. It's the ulimate show of ambition, or perhaps, hubris, from King, snarling, as he does in the film's memetically hilarious trailer, "If you want it done right you ought to do it yourself...I just wanted someone to do Stephen King right", and runs from a gloriously ridiculous b-movie to a nine million dollar vanity project, from a director/author deep in the throes of addictions so numerous that it's become infamous and featuring his favourite band on the soundtrack, to the film that arguably saved his life in its pure, maddening extravagance. It is, undeniably, the best film Stephen King has ever made.

It's early 1985, and gate staff at De Laurentiis Entertainment Group have a bit of a problem. By this point, Dino De Laurentiis has already become a household name, from Conan the Barbarian, the remake of King Kong, the camp classic Flash Gordon and David Lynch's Dune, to name but a few films he's produced in a career already covering four decades. The 1984 film, Firestarter (another King adaption) has given him a full-on studio, in Wilmington, on the coast of North Carolina, and over its six years in operation, it will give the world Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Evil Dead II, Blue Velvet, Cobra Verdi...and Transformers: The Movie. But early in 1985, only Raw Deal, by John Irvin (best known this side of the Atlantic for directing the BBC adaption of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, largely due to his contract with De Laurentiis, and a cinematic outing for girls' toy, My Little Pony, are actually in production.

This is about to change. At the gates, astride a motorcycle with Maine plates, sits a dusty dishevelled figure, who keeps telling the gate staff that he's here to hold talks about a film involving killer trucks and a comet. This, of course, is Stephen King, who will shortly sign a multi-film deal with De Laurentiis. The intervening years between The Shining and this dusty arrival in North Carolina have been mixed. King is, by now, perhaps the most famous horror author in America, a regular presence on the best-sellers list, and even at this point, has been regularly adapted by the big, and indeed small screens. He is also a complete mess; the best-seller Cujo, in which a rabid dog attacks the residents of a small town, is a complete blur, even to King today, and his family have already staged an intervention, dumping a small pharmacy worth of beer, cocaine, mouthwash, Xanax, cigarettes, NyQuil and Valium in front of him. King will eventually get clean in the late 1980s. Between now and then lies Maximum Overdrive.

Maximum Overdrive, like its novel, begins with a comet, whose presence is felt throughout the film in the odd green tinge the sky has during the film's many night-time setpiece; this comet is practically the B-Movie staple writ large, and, as the film's obligatory King cameo, in which a cash-machine hurls abuse at the start of the mechanical uprising, gives way to opening credits as an opening bridge sends vehicles and hapless drivers falling down the slopes or into the river below, and the greatest credit in cinema history (Well, second, after "Orson Welles as Unicron"), announces the arrival of Australia's favourite hard rock band to proceedings. We then travel to the nearby town, as the film, in enjoyably dark vignettes, sees a baseball team massacred by flying drinks cans, road rollers, with the sole survivor bolting across the now sundered suburbia to safety, chased by an ice cream van and lawnmower.

From here, via the film's standout star, the Marvel Green Goblin-adorned truck, the film fleshes out its human heroes, the truck stop that steadily comes under attack a perfect-perhaps too perfect microcosm of King archetypes, from lazy, cruel, and bizarely well-armed bosses (Pat Hingle), to their siccophantic sidekicks, to hysterical, fragile women (a scene-stealing Ellen McElduff), to our everyman hero (80s stalwart, Emilio Estevez). As the trucks begin to circle, this brings overly zealous (and money-driven) preacher Camp, (Christopher Murney), and his young runaway passenger into the truck stop, followed by a newly married couple, King has his captive slice of Americana to wind up and let loose at each other.

Where Maximum Overdrive is strongest, ironically for a film that otherwise leans heavily into absurdly over-the-top B-movieisms, in the claustrophic truck stop. Here, characters, from the phony religiousness of Camp that turns nasty the moment he is thwarted, or his car is threatened, to the bickering couple of Connie and Curt that essentially acts as a shorthand for the married life, to the enjoyable meet cute between Estevez's Bill and tag-along Brett (Laura Harrington), to the survivor of the baseball team massacre, the young Deke (Holter Graham). When these characters are left time to bounce against each other, it's proof that King can not only write Americana at its best, and its dark underbelly, but direct it pretty well.

Unfortunately, the rest of Maximum Overdrive is trucks trying to kill humanity, with all the cocaine maximalism of the mid 80s, all the subtlety of a 12-Wheeler, and all the impact of a a Dinky toy. It is impressively, ridiculously, dumb, and, most frustratingly, inconsistent with it. At points the machines are genuinely frightening in their rampage-the sudden attack of an electric knife, and the lawnmower that cost DP Armando Nannuzzi his eye are enjoyably threatening, as is the truck that pursues Connie and Curt to the truckstop, eventually barrelling down a slope to explode. Elsewhere, especially when the film gets to the crux of why they are threatening the truck-stop, the trucks themselves are, in a word, ridiculous-at one point, Estavez goes up to the ear of the Green Goblin and whispers into it, whilst the destruction of the trucks, and the heroes making their bid for freedom, is neither exhilarating, nor particularly spectacular. What results is a rudderless, messy film with an awol director, that somehow feels less like King's work than any adaption before or since.

Maximum Overdrive, in a word, is crap. It is a seventeen page story, one of the first King ever wrote, blown up into a film that cost half the budget of building an entire hotel in Elstree for The Shining to blow up a few trucks and generally rage B-Movie carnage across a small chunk of North Carolina, in which a bunch of B-list actors, and a few who will later become (in)famous stars, an Italian DP who barely speaks English who was blinded and later sued King, AC/DC in full creative stagnation, and an absolutely raddled and barely functional alcoholic Stephen King make a complete clattering mess of a film. In two words, though, it's enjoyable crap, a director having fun with the very nature of a B-Movie, with adapting his own work, and its overwrought presentation, and utter bloody ludicrousness.If nothing else, it lays out what Stephen King's strengths, and indeed weaknesses as an author are.

Rating: Recommended


  Like articles like this? Want them up to a week early? Why not support me on my Patreon from just £1/$1.20 a month! https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond