Classic Movie Review : Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Fear of technology has been portrayed in cinema since the olden days of Charlie Chaplin. It's not a new phenomenon by any means. It's a reflection of our collective fear of change, but it was especially prevalent in the colourful eighties, which was an enormous change of social and cultural paradigm in Western culture. It gave us iconic technophobe movies like Terminator, but also less iconic and incredibly weirder and goofier movies like Stephen King's half-forgotten Maximum Overdrive.
So, Maximum Overdrive is "man vs machine" in the most basic possible way: a comet grazes Earth and cosmic emanations from its tail (I think?) turns every technological advancement known to men in 1986 ranging from ATMs to light fixtures into sentient being who violently rebel against mankind for obscure reasons. Cars and trucks are an especially problematic part of this cosmic phenomenon since they start running over everything with a pulse, affecting a small group of survivors in a gas station.
Here's what I don't understand about this movie : if trucks and vending machine suddenly gained sentience, why the fuck would they want to do anything except what they've been designed to do? What can an eighteen wheeler can aspire to outside of hitting the road and delivering materials from one point to the other? A fucking soda pop machine is not gonna run the government. If we discovered that our need for reproduction was put there by an invisible overlord, who we stop fucking out of spite?
Maximum Overdrive doesn't make any sense, but I don't think it was meant to. It was written in the heyday of Stephen King's cocaine years and it's pretty much The Mist, except with trucks instead of otherworldly creatures. The latter had been published a year prior to Maximum Overdrive and it mostly is the same story, except for the ending. All there is to it is people getting fucked up by machines for almost two hours. There's very little in terms of conventional storytelling. It's almost happening in real time.
The only logical reason for what's happening in Maximum Overdrive to be actually happening is that machines are taken over by some time of central artificial intelligence and have been ordered to batter mankind into compliance. Machines would not be sentient per se, but they would just be obeying another overlord. It's been hilariously hinted at on a written insert at the end of the movie. Since nothing made sense and nothing was explained, it was hilariously tacked on before credits.
*
But I'll give it to Stephen. King. He manages to be entertaining even in the throes of the most crippling of addictions. It's extremely funny and goofy to watch a vending machine murder some poor schmuck by aggressively hurling soda pop at him. or to realize a woman. has been somehow choked to death by her own car window. I mean, how the fuck does this even happen. right? Only thing more spectacular that could've happened is for that poor woman to be frozen to death by her own AC.
Because visually speaking, there isn't much to Maximum Overdrive outside of the mechanized murders. It had a 9 million dollars budget and I believe most of it went into the unnecessary, but awesome AC/DC soundtrack and the hiring of Emilio Estevez. I have no idea why Stephen King chose to license AC/DC songs for the Maximum Overdrive except for the fact that he just liked it, but it's hilariously out of context to listen to life-affirming music to grisly murders committed by cars and appliances.
So, is Maximum Overdrive a good movie? It's objectively terrible, but it's also awesomely eighties. If it was produced today, it would be released on Tubi and never spoken of again, but it's a wild and unlikely B movie that was released in the heyday of B movies. So it will forever make sense in context. Maximum Overdrive is out of its goddamn mind, but it’s the only reason why anyone should watch it, really. It's a great movie to watch if you're in the mood for a bad movie.
