bad/awesome flixxx review: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

"Honey! C'mon over here, Sugar-buns. This machine just called me an asshole!"- S. King

"It isn't the comet. It's a broom. Imagine you're a race of aliens, right? And, you're looking for a new place to live. Say you're looking for a planet like you and I looking for a new place to live. A new house. So here's Earth. Only it's like this big old house. And, it's kind of polluted, dirty, and smoky. Grease on the walls, soot in the chimney. So, they send in their interstellar housecleaners. Send in their broom. Sweep us all up. That's what this it is, it's a broom. Using our own machines to sweep us right off.- Bill

"Fucked if I know, Bubba. Fucked if I know."- Hendershot

What an enjoyable movie experience. This is one of those flicks that you saw years ago, but its been so long, and maybe you only saw it once, and so you never fully appreciated how awesome it was. Touted as the first Stephen King story to be written for the screen and directed by the man himself, this is a movie that brings so many things to the table that you have to appreciate the effort. Ok, for starters you have a Stephen King flick, filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina(!) about machines going haywire, starring Pat Hingle and Emilio Estevez, a truck with the Green Goblin's Face on the front, with a soundtrack completely by AC/DC?!!??! Are you fucking kidding me "bubba"?? King was so intent on letting the world know that HE made this movie that he put himself in the trailer and on the official US poster (which sucks, so I also posted the Spanish version). All that and more in a little movie called MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!!!





Ok, so a comet came past the Earth, and it was said that the Earth would be in the tail of the comet for 8 days. Right from the start, weird things begin to happen concerning machines. A draw-bridge comes alive while the guards are playing cards and lets drivers pass onto it, and begins rising, throwing the cars back onto each other, knocking dudes into the bay, smashing perfectly good watermelons, and also killing people too, which I've heard most people aren't fond of. Meanwhile over at the Dixie Boy gas station (which reminds me of the truck stops over where Interstate 40 begins or ends) a funny looking truck pulls up and things start to go awry. Also over at the little league field, a drink machine goes ape killing a coach, a steam roller smashes kids up and one kid Deke manages to escape.



So the Dixie Boy is the main scene of the action. The whole arcade starts freaking out and one of the video games kills a dude. Then an electric knife almost kills a waitress. Then the trucks start freaking out. Driving wherever they want, running down patrons. This chick is hitching to Florida with this creep Bible salesman, & he's not paying attention to anything but her, & she hears on the radio that the shit is going down. So she MAKES him pull over, quickly falls in lust with Bill the "hero" fry cook. Mr. Hendershot runs the Dixie Boy with mandatory community service cases & blackmails them. His son also works there. They are fat lazy mouthy worthless people, but Mr. Hendershot DID stockpile a shitload of surface-to-air missiles and machine-guns in his basement. So apparently he thought ahead. The trucks destroy the bible salesman's car, & he tries to go reprimand the trucks to his early demise.



The trucks begin to circle the gas station & two newlyweds successfully make it to the Dixie Boy. This is weird though, because they are driving a car that never turns on them. Every other machine in the movie or "on Earth" is supposedly fucked up, yet their Tercel is just peaches....Hmmmm?? They try to save the bible salesman who seems to be alive, but he's not really, but Deke gets rescued into the Dixie Boy instead. In the morning the trucks send a front-end loader and a machine-gun mounted army vehicle to negotiate. The army truck starts speaking Morse code & Deke decodes it. They want the survivors to refuel them. Bill starts the process & they pump for hours, days, until the gas runs out, then there's a fuel truck & they make the humans fuel the trucks from it. Everyone is sick and tired of the trucks, so they distract the machine gun car, blow him up with a grenade, machine gun a few more big rigs, blow up the Dixie Boy, then head for the coast, because Bill supposedly knows how to sail a ship.



When they arrive at the docks... and believe me this would've taken them a few hours from where they were... They would've had to go straight thru town!! Lots of machines to dodge! Anyway.... they get there and one greedy truck driver goes for this chick's huge ring and then the Green Goblin gets him. Bill fires a missile at it, jumps on the boat, and then they sail to an island with no machines off the coast called Haven... which is probably based on Bald Head Island. But they do have golf carts there, so WATCH OUT BILL! Then a screen comes on that says that a UFO was shot down by a Soviet "satellite" equipped with missiles & a laser gun. So I guess it wasn't the comet after all.... This movie rocks. I don't care what anyone says. It rocks hard. Stephen King never directed anything else, says he was coked out of his mind when he did this, and basically feigns that it isn't good, but if you like to laugh, and to rock, then fuck him because he doesn't even know what he's talking about. He had to have fun making it. A little kid crushed to death by a steamroller!! Go ahead and see it through... its good 80s horror comedy sci fi camp.

***********UPDATE!!!***********

@therobotviking says:
What, no mention of one of the best badass lines in film history? "Adios, motherfucker." [fires rocket launcher]

@valientthorr says:
it DID predate "Yippie Kai AAa motherfucker" (DIE HARD) by 2 years.... so yeah, def worth mentioning... there were a ton of great lines in here. My personal fav was when the front end loader and the machine gun truck ride up and the trucker slams the saloon doors open, "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON OUT THERE?".