Dysart’s Travel Stop is a bustling highway haven just outside Bangor, Maine. Beyond boasting a truly stunning variety of reposing big rigs and a great slice of blueberry pie, Dysart’s low-key claim to fame lies in its status as inspiration for Stephen King’s 1973 short story Trucks. Just as the Stanley Hotel supposedly served as the basis for The Shining’s eerie Overlook, the truck stop’s ambient engine rumble and strong stench of diesel led to one of the author’s earliest instances of inanimate objects manifesting a deep-seated urge to crush humans into paste. It’s easy to understand the impetus, and the crush of huge autos feels especially jarring deep in the heart of King country, in which pines stretch out endlessly in nearly every direction, an eerie blanket of emptiness surrounding a droning hive of activity.
The story remains an insignificant footnote in the author’s voluminous oeuvre, but was eventually developed into Maximum Overdrive, King’s lone directorial effort, a since-disavowed 1986 adaptation that merits a bit more attention. An idle post-pie search confirmed the film could be found on Tubi, the streaming base for all things crude and cheesy, the perfect home for a curio of such low repute. Produced by the legendary Dino De Laurentiis at the tail-end of a particularly wild ‘80s run, the movie is a scrapyard of potential ideas put haltingly into practice, coasting on a vivid sense of aggravation and a slew of admittedly spectacular explosions. The narrative concerns a scheme by which an invasion force of aliens, hiding out in the tail of a passing comet, impel Earth’s machines to rise up against and wipe out their human overlords, thus leaving an empty planet ripe for resettling. At least, this is the suggested motive provided by one of the characters, although it seems just as valid to discount the unseen aliens and imagine the autos (along with miscellaneous other mechanical allies) are rising up of their own volition, fed up with the life of servitude imposed by their callous creators.
The film’s actual plot is negligible, centered around various stock characters holing up inside a truck stop (far less impressive than Dysart’s sprawling environs) to wage a final stand against the ravening gas guzzlers. Lead among these is Emilio Estevez as the enterprising fry cook Bill Robinson, with notable turns by Pat Hingle (playing the far-more-memorably named, perfectly oleaginous owner Bubba Hendershot) and a pre-The Simpsons Yeardley Smith. A young Giancarlo Esposito shows up briefly to get electrocuted by a rebellious arcade cabinet, and King himself cameos as a man in an altercation with a salty, sentient ATM machine.
In some ways, this is a feature-length adaptation of The Twilight Zone episode where a home’s host of gadgets and devices are transformed into a menacing horde of electrified assailants. There, the fantastic tale was a statement on the infusion of supposed suburban conveniences that actually nurse an insidious grudge against our own comfort. Similar social commentary is attempted here, with the noise and bustle of contemporary life posited as a distraction from the things that really matter (e.g. churning out thousand-page-plus tomes on modern decay). In execution, Maximum Overdrive serves as an excuse for a massively coked up (by his own admission) King to indulge his comically sadistic side. The result is grotesque, eccentric, and at times pretty fun, a weird one-shot by a major artist working in a different medium, although the overall effect is diminished by an amateur’s inability to properly pace or build up momentum.
There’s also the air of disreputable sleaze around the entire production, which seems to have been a shitshow of grandiose proportions. Some of these chaotic behind-the-scenes stories provide a fun baseline of lore for a movie of mixed quality, but others, like DP Armando Nannuzzi losing an eye to a splinter over King’s insistence on keeping the actual blades affixed to a modified lawnmower (despite their not appearing in the shot) makes one wonder if it was all worth it. This is often a fraught question in cases of films whose development led to appreciable harm to cast members or crew, but in this situation the answer is an easy, definitive no. Nothing in Maximum Overdrive merits the havoc wreaked by its creation, and it’s likely this sordid fact (and the fallout from Nannuzzi’s resulting $18 million lawsuit) which has prevented much critical reappraisal in the years since. Yet like Roar, and other misbegotten relics of this torrid era, the document remains, inviting curious rubberneckers to peek in at a 40-year-old car wreck.
In retrospect, Maximum Overdrive’s most prominent feature is that it feels like a trial run for the far superior Tremors, shuffling together Western, horror and comedic tropes in a half-ironic creature feature largely revolving around a single location. The film itself remains shambolic and sloppy, but it’s also hard to hold too much scorn for a movie in which a little league coach has his skull caved in by a possessed soda machine, followed by one of his players getting flattened by a rogue steamroller appearing out of nowhere. The brutal cartoon aspect is the most engaging, while the shoehorning of airy Wild West ideals, specifically around a retinue of good guys holed up against an invasive enemy force, provides a dull, ponderous edge.
There are a few other interesting threads poking out, like the vague hints of ‘50s tough-guy greaser theatrics arrayed around Estevez’s ostensible star turn. This includes a late-film transition toward a James Dean-esque exhausted sensitivity, particularly a monologue about trucks absorbing and reflecting human pain, which feels ported in from a different movie entirely. This big monologue, while effective in a gonzo fashion (one might be reminded of Michael Cera’s brief appearance as Wally Brando in Twin Peaks: The Return), ultimately highlights King’s total lack of facility with actors. Pros like Hingle and Frankie Faison can swing a serviceable performance, but younger stars like Estevez and Laura Harrington are left adrift, struggling to stay afloat amid the clashing welter of tones and styles.
The speech itself, meanwhile, connects with a classic King fixation, on internal demons being projected outward, emotional specters of trauma and abuse reconfigured into monstrous threats to the social structure as a whole. There’s certainly the potential to connect these artistic inclinations to less-than-prestigious material, but a substance-addled first-time director running riot on an anarchic, low-budget set clearly isn’t the way to do it, and so results the misshapen spectacle of half-formed characters battling to express their inner turmoil within the cinematic equivalent of a demolition derby. The author’s novels are often choppily written and chunky, but they attain an aggregate power that’s hard to deny, pulling off a complex program of high-and-low genre-mixing that, at its best, results in monumental work capable of speaking to a huge audience. Maximum Overdrive achieves none of this, a hectic, intermittently entertaining junker that’s rightfully remembered as a catastrophic folly.
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