Beautiful Junk #1: Maximum Overdrive
Welcome to Beautiful Junk, loving lookbacks over terrible films that I cherish with all of my dark little heart. First up is Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King’s 1986 self-beshitting.
Hold up, Lew - did you say Stephen King? The Stephen King?
You’re damn right I did, bubba. Dino de Laurentis, a successful producer despite being blessed with a headful of cabbage, decided in the mid-80s that the recent slew of unsuccessful King adaptations was down to the fact that the big man himself was not personally involved enough. So mad old Dino persuaded King to boot down from Maine to North Carolina and make a movie. A couple of small problems with that one, Dino, old son. The first, and really quite glaring, issue was that King had never directed a film in his life. The second problem was that King was deep in his battle with addiction, smashing booze and coke with wild abandon, still a couple of years away from the intervention that cleaned him up.
But hey, we’re not talking about A Beautiful Mind here. This is a film about machines gaining sentience and turning on their creators. How bad can it be? Bad. Really bad. Maximum Overdrive is, in King’s own words, ‘a moron movie’ - it is a film so dumb and annoying you could stick a blond wig on it and call it Boris Johnson. The difference between Maximum Overdrive and Boris Johnson is that I love Maximum Overdrive with all of my heart. I first watched it when I was maybe 10 (it was the 80s, don’t judge), and it lodged in my frontal lobe from that moment. It has stupid, paper thin characters being chewed up by malevolent trucks, set to an AC/DC soundtrack. You try telling me that it’s not pitched at 10-year-olds.
After an opening scrawl about comets we get a quick cameo from the big man himself (an ATM calls him an asshole, preempting the sentiments of most of the audience) before we’re straight into the opening credits and our first big dumb set piece, as a drawbridge opens by itself. Cars flip, watermelons squish, people scream, and one poor ignoble stuntman gets to portray Motorcyclist-who-shits-himself. Yes, someone out there in Hollywood has this on his CV: I dropped 50 feet while fake, liquid shit chased me all the way down to the drink. We then get some sledgehammer comic relief as the two bridge operators - Dumb Young Guy and Furious Old Guy - briefly discuss the carnage before them.
That’s all the preamble we need, as Big Steve gets straight to the meat of the story and takes us to the Dixie Boy truck stop. The guvnor is a crooked piece of shit called Bubba Hendershot, played by the excellent Pat Hingle. Bubba’s schtick is that he calls everyone Bubba. (It’s as confusing as it sounds, I did try to tee you up in the intro.) In case you didn’t realise that he is A Bad Guy, Bubba’s staff of little Bubbas are all parolees so he can undercut their pay. In some languid exposition, he explains this to the most handsome, well developed and blatantly heroic of all of the little Bubbas: Bill Robinson, played by Emilio Estevez, fresh off The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire but still in the run up to his Young Guns peak. Estevez appears to have been drugged and held against his will, such is the torpor of his performance.
Joining them over the next few scenes are waitress Wanda June, newlyweds Curtis and Connie (the latter played by a shrieking Yeardley ‘Lisa Simpson’ Smith), hitchhiker Brett, lecherous bible salesman Loman, and seven or eight more thinly sketched characters who we all know will serve as fodder. The gang quickly learn that Something Is Very Wrong. Wanda June gets attacked by an electric kitchen knife (“It bit me!” she wails); Curtis and Connie are chased by a malevolent tow truck; Brett and Loman observe dozens of trucks driving themselves down the highway. Well, Brett does. Loman just drives the car and pervs over her. Stephen King just loves the corrupt religious nut trope. By the time they’re all gathered at the Dixie Boy, it is surrounded by sentient trucks, led (yes, led) by a Green Goblin-faced Happy Toyz big rig.
Last to join our ragtag bunch is Deke, a plucky teen whose dad Duncan has already bought out of proceedings early on: blinded by diesel but still insistent he needs to save his boy, he gets splattered after dropping his keys. Why does he need his keys? He can’t drive, he’s blind. His front door won’t hold back a rampaging vehicle. I wonder about poor old Dunc every time I watch. Get your hands out of your pockets, man! Anyway, Deke’s at a little League game when the machines kick off. In a fantastic bit of grim comedy, his coach gets shot in the gut then the face by a soda machine, which then immediately starts spraying cans at all the kids. Deke hops on his bike and gives it legs as another of his pals gets run over by a steamroller. Deke’s journey to the Dixie Boy hints at some incredible off-screen carnage: a woman garotted by her hairdryer, a man choked out by his headphones, a dog rammed in the face to death by a remote control car. King has alluded to many deleted scenes, especially from this section. The campaign for a shiny new 4K director’s cut starts here!
Back at the Dixie Boy, the trucks are still circling the joint for reasons unknown. Loman the Scumbag Bible Salesman takes umbrage when his car is rammed. He abandons the food, shelter and safety of the Dixie Boy and furiously pelts into the trucks’ playground, screaming “I’m gonna tear ‘em off, boy!” and “You wanna rock n’ roll with me, pusbag?” Not very Christian language. It takes him about three seconds to immediately regret his decision, before the Green Goblin swats him into a drainage ditch. Wanda June gets drunk and gifts us some of the best ham and cheese acting you will ever see in your life, literally jumping up and down on the spot and screeching “You CAN’T! We MADE you!” (Whether this was King’s direction or the acting prowess of Ellen McElduff I know not, but it is a tour de force of b-movie lunacy.) Wanda June is dragged back inside but the machines cut the power in the face of her insolence, prompting her to utter an instantly cowed “Oh god, not the dark! Please God, I’m scared.” Worst. Uprising. Ever.
The Dixie Boy freedom fighters discover a cache of weapons in the basement (I don’t know, don’t ask) and tool up. Bill and Curtis, who has been transformed from inept nerd to rugged action hero by the mere presence of Emilio Estevez, rescue Deke from Loman (haha, fooled you, he wasn’t dead, merely mangled!) in the drainage ditch, blow up a truck and then all go back inside for a nice sleepover.
That’s far too much fighting back for the trucks. The next morning, reinforcements arrive in the shape of a bulldozer and a… what is that? Some little army tank with an M60 mounted atop it. A machine gun go kart?. Yeah sure, a machine gun go kart. Super Mario needs one of those. Anyway, this is where the action really jumps up. The bulldozer smashes into the place, so Bubba blows it up with a grenade launcher. This prompts Machine Gun Buggy to light the place up, killing off some nameless fodder and big bad Bubba. It’s an oddly vanilla death for such a hissable villain. This sequence highlights King’s ineptitude behind the camera. Pat Hingle gently swoons to the floor under a generous ketchupy splash of fake blood, while one extra stands stock still for a clear second before the squibs go off and he staggers back to his doom. My cousin and I essayed better death scenes in our pre-teen home horror movies. This orgy of violence ends with Wanda June returning to her “We made you!” refrain and swiftly taking a load of lead for her trouble. Farewell Wanda June, we made you barely knew you.
The horn on that little bullet wagon starts parping away and Deke quickly susses out that it’s Morse Code. The trucks are hungry, and the survivors are on catering duty. This brings us to the dullest montage in movie history - where King tries to convey the pounding heat and exhaustion of human enslavement to machine and instead delivers, well, people filling up petrol tanks for three minutes. AC/DC gave him Hell’s Bells for this bit, Hell’s bloody Bells, and he whacks it over the top of a grimy BP advert.
After a hard day pumping gas and collecting reward points, a sun cooked and exhausted Bill suddenly remembers an island off the coast where they don’t allow motorised vehicles. (Clearly Estevez’s lethargic performance is actually a very clever portrayal of the dimmest man on earth, because if I knew of such a place I would’ve hot footed it there yesterday, William.) Thus energised, Bill immediately recovers to lead the Dixie Boy mob in busting the hell out of there, which they do by just… crawling out of the drain they used to rescue Deke earlier. That seemed rather easy, gang. No multi-year dig like Andy in Shawshank, just lift up the manhole cover and off you pop.
The trucks don’t take too kindly to this, and set about ruthlessly wrecking the Dixie Boy. There’s a gleeful effectiveness to the practical effects here, with stunt drivers simply smashing through the set. Everything gets levelled, ending in an explosion so gigantic the camera shakes. CGI be damned, you will never be able to top those glorious, huge 80s explosions. While the physical effects are great the sound effects are jaw dropping for very different reasons. The bulldozer (apparently not blown up by Bubba earlier) sounds like it's laughing at one point, while the Happy Toyz Green Goblin truck undoubtedly issues a demonic roar as it flees the scene.
Because yes, friends, we ain’t finished yet. Our heroes see off a drive through order board that attempts to rat them out (“Humans near, humans near, humans near”) and a rampaging ice cream van before they make it to the marina. At which point Brad (who the fuck is Brad and why are we learning his name at this point?) decides to stop - about 10 feet from salvation - to steal a huge diamond ring from a dead woman’s hand. Everyone seems dreadfully concerned for this desecrator’s welfare when the Goblin truck appears behind him but honestly, he just robbed a corpse - it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him as he gets ploughed under.
With the graverobber dispatched, Bill swiftly eliminates the final big bad in another satisfyingly gigantic explosion (Happy Toyz clearly come with batteries included) and our survivors sail off into the sunrise. Before the sweet release of the end credits and You Shook Me All Night Long, there’s one last shrill declaration from Connie and an epilogue text scroll (yes, another text scroll) which heavily implies that the comet was actually the work of aliens. But don’t fret because a Soviet ‘weather satellite’ fired several nuclear warheads and blew them up. King is often pilloried for his endings and this one might take the biscuit.
Maximum Overdrive was trounced upon release, but there’s a visceral cheap thrill to proceedings; like those teenage parties where all the booze ran out except for a bottle of cheap tequila. What are you gonna do, go home? Nah, you’re gonna chug it down and pray for a lime wedge. Every now and then, King throws you a lime wedge. AC/DC’s involvement is probably the juiciest of them all. The band were mired in their own doldrums in the mid-80s, but, Hell’s Bells aside, their classics are deployed with aplomb, and their muscular brand of meat and two veg rock undoubtedly gees the film up when its flagging. Who Made Who, recorded especially for the film, became their biggest hit in years.
Sound is used to good effect overall. While I take the piss out of laughing bulldozers, there’s an endearing gonzo humour to a sentient, murderous 16 wheeler growling happily to itself. King loves layering dialogue and events in his books, overlapping the two to convey chaos and confusion, and he does a good job with that trick on screen. He is also famously agricultural when it comes to dialogue, especially earlier in his career. On Maximum Overdrive he is in wild full flow. Almost every character gets to deliver a down home zinger. Witness Brett’s wonderful “Mr Hendershot, just a little lesson in manners from the road twitch” before she slaps him across the face. What in blazes is a road twitch? You’d have to ask King. As leading man, Estevez gets that classic Kingism “Jesus is coming and he is pissed” late on in the film. Even the irksome, hysterical Connie slows down at one point to deliver a rather touching “Don’t make me a widow on my wedding day, Curtis.”
Over time, there’s been some gentle reassessment of Maximum Overdrive. I’ve loved it since day one. While it is undeniably stupid and thinly sketched - mutton stodge slopped out on a tin plate - it delivers brutal action with a grim good cheer. King’s eldest son, Joe Hill, has talked about a remake, and while I usually roll my eyes at that sort of talk he could be onto something here. With AI looming soullessly over all of us, the idea of fighting back against overreaching tech appeals more than ever. Just so long as we keep those big explosions real.
Sounds weirdly brilliant 🤣 think I’m gonna try dig it out to watch. You should be a film critic , I was actually in the story , a bit freaked out by the green goblin face though 😂