Stephen King's
MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE


Available on disc

A comet passes so close to Earth that the planet moves through its tail. As a result of this, many of the machines in the world take on a life of their own, a murderous life. The staff and patrons of a remote truck stop must battle with the giant trucks that have them surrounded.

When everything from doorstop-sized novels down to very short stories have been adapted for the big screen with extremely variable effect, what is one of the world's most successful author's to do? Why direct an adaptation himself and show everyone how it is done. How it is done, however, seems to be badly. There is a reason why Stephen King has directed only one film and the reason is the film he directed. MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE is, to put it mildly, not very good and as the writer of the short story on which it is based, the adapter of said story and the director of the film, he must bear the full weight of its failure. He has stated publicly that he doesn't remember making the film because he was strung out on cocaine most of the time. That may be an explanation, but it's not an excuse.

Considering it comes from the master teller of horror stories, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE isn't very scary. There's a chance that it isn't meant to be, going instead after a comic horror feel. The trouble is that, after the initial sequences (an ATM calls King himself an asshole and a little league coach gets hit in the nuts with a can from a vending machine howitzer), it's not funny at all. Trucks are inherently scary things - Stephen Spielberg proved that with the thriller DUEL. The ringleader of the killer juggernauts even has the grinning face of Spider-Man's nemesis the Green Goblin on the front to up the scary factor, but apart from the eyes going red a couple of times it doesn't do anything scary. Sure, it backs into a character at one point, but that moment is completely fluffed. In fact, all of the big moments are completely fluffed. Each time someone dies, the moment is squashed by either amateurish direction or amateurish editing.

It doesn't help that there are no real characters to care about. Emilio Estevez and Pat Hingle are the nominal stars, but both are one note characters, the young hero from the wrong side of the tracks and the slimy exploiter of all men. Laura Harrington makes no impact as a supposedly feisty hitch-hiker and the rest of the bar patrons are so anonymous that you can't tell if you noticed them before their demise. King's script has no place for character development, or even character for that matter.

It also doesn't have internal logic. The tail of the comet makes machines animate and homicidal, but only those the plot needs to be. The truck chasing the newlyweds down the highway is certainly out to get them, but their car is perfectly behaved at all times. The self-driving machine gun has a mind of its own, but the machine guns the humans are using don't. It's all very arbitrary.

It's also completely unstructured. There is no third act to speak of. The truck stop meets its climactic end, but that's neither the climax nor the end. The truck with the Green Goblin's face shows up for the big final moment, but then goes out in a blaze of anticlimax. King knows scary vehicles, he wrote Christine after all, but he hasn't written, or directed, any of them into this film.

There have been some poor adaptation of King stories over the years, so it's perhaps only fitting that the one he made himself ranks amongst the worst.