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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 23.94%
Worth A Look: 28.17%
Average: 5.63%
Pretty Bad: 25.35%
Total Crap: 16.9%
3 reviews, 53 user ratings
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| Maximum Overdrive |
by Paulapalooza
"Minimum effort from everyone involved"
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There are those who might argue that Stepen King's highly publicized run-in with an out-of-control van is an appropriate stanza of poetic justice for directing this particularly fetid chunk of bowl biscuit about machinery gone amok.I'm not one of them, because, man, the guy has written some stories I wholly enjoy. However, nothing short of burning the master print of this thing and issuing an apology to each and every person who paid any sort of hard-earned wage to see it could redeem the master of terror for unleashing this limp exercise in how NOT to make a movie. Hell, King should grovel before the people who snuck in to see it.
Does anyone remember the ad campaign for "Maximum Underwrite"? It consisted of King glowering at the camera, sneering and muttering vapidities about how he's WRITTEN a bunch of stuff, but never directed something for the screen, intercut with rapid-fire snippets from the damn movie. Then at the end, King sneers, 'I'm gonna scare the hell out of you." The dull, leaden ad is both more menacing and more personality-laden than the movie which it shills.
Cutting to the criticism of the film itself, this ass-treacle is based on a short story of King's own writing titled "Trucks," appearing in a collection of short stories called "Night Shift." It was also later re-made as a TV movie also titled "Trucks" Re-made for TV and reportedly an improvement? Yikes.
Emilio Estevez and Pat Hingle are but a couple of the actors who needed to make a house payment and find themselves cornered in a restaurant/truck stop type area surrounded by angry, intelligent big rigs, one of which has a big plastic Green Goblin face stuck on the cab and is therefore the "leader." The cast is unceremoniously bumped off in a variety of uninteresting, derivative ways, usually screaming something like "You can't do this! We MADE you!" while AC/DC music plays. Yep, those dissonant strains and wailings aren't audience members, they're the compositions of the aging Aussie metal kings whose act was growing ancient even back in the halcyon days of 1986.
There is nothing to redeem this. No knowing winks at the audience. No good "bad" performance. No thought-worthy soliloquy from the doomed. The actors run around spewing dialogue you can barely understand. Perhaps worst of all, trucks circling endlessly and endlessly just…aren't scary.
To be fair, King has admitted both that he was trying to make a cheap, funny horror film, and that the studio unleashed him on the set without any real knowledge of how to make a movie. I can't say if either of these statements are true, but if I were Stephen I'd be looking for any damage control I could muster.
Yes, this is the rarest of creatures. A crap movie that wouldn't even be passable while watching under heavy medication and a bong the size of an eighteen wheeler's exhaust pipe. It sucks and sucks and when there's no blood left, it goes for stomach acid and seepageWe conquered polio years ago, and the only remaining samples exist in laboratories while the scientific community debates whether it would be wise to exterminate the last remnants of this dangerous life-form. If the argument were about "Maximum Overdrive," there would be no debate----grease the fucker.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=2337&reviewer=21
originally posted: 11/01/99 10:59:56
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USA
02-Nov-1986 (R)
DVD: 07-Sep-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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