Maximum Overdrive

Start your engines for ROAD RAGE Month at Mondo Mondays, featuring terrifically trashy tales of gas-guzzling vehicles gone wild!

“The Day Horror Went Into Overdrive.” It’s Hapless Humans vs. Bullying Big Rigs when a passing comet causes all the machines on Earth to turn against their users in a full throttle orgy of grinding metal and blaring AC/DC tunes from director/writer Stephen King!  Based on his own short story, “Trucks,” Stephen King made his directorial debut (and simultaneous directorial swan song) with this infamously troubled truck fetish horror flick about an intergalactic incident that douses the planet with weird radiation, causing all machines to go bat-crap crazy.   A soda machine massacres a little league team with projectile Coke cans. A lawn mower trims a guy’s face. An ATM machine calls a customer an “A**Hole.” But the mechanical madness really goes into overdrive when homicidal 18-Wheelers kill their owners and drive themselves to North Carolina, where they terrorize a group of human survivors who have holed themselves up in a truck stop. Soon, Emilio Estevez, as a short order cook with a criminal record and a rocket launcher, is leading a band of anti-truck rebels in a furious battle for highway domination against the driverless machines. This steel-plated, gas-guzzling shocker is pure, unbridled Mondo trash, featuring children being crushed under steam-rollers, a semi-truck sporting a Green Goblin face, and AC/DC music that will shake you all night long.   Blatantly ridiculous, incoherently directed and undeniably awesome, Maximum Overdrive is 100 miles of bad movie road with no exits in sight. (Dir. by Stephen King, 1986, USA, 97 mins., Rated R)