There was a time, back in the days of my rose-colored youth, when Maximum Overdrive was my favorite movie. The concept of trucks running people over gave my sick little frame shivers of glee.
Well, I hate to break it to you, my former impressionable self, Maximum Overdrive is a stupid, stupid movie. It's one great big lazy logical flaw spread out over an hour and a half. The AC/DC soundtrack partially redeems it, as do the large red smears on the grills of every mack track this side of Boise. Hell, I even get a little nostalgic watching this one, as if it were some bizarre home movie of mine that TNT and TBS use to fill up late night airtime.
So here's the pitch: Earth gets enveloped it the tail of this huge comet for about five days and all mechanical devices on the planet start going crazy and killing people, real deliberate-like. See, that's because it's an evil comet. You can tell by the lime-flavored glow that it has in our wonderfully concise exposition sequence. After all, who needs exposition? We've got trucks running people over!
I'll get the easy ones out of the way first. The entire 'first act,' as you film nerds might call it (and you know who you are), is utterly pointless and devoid of the character development that would make me cheer for the people instead of the oppressed lawnmowers and pop machines of the world (the world in this case being America, you jingoistic crackers). It serves only to show a number of shockless and illogical (there I go bringing my stupid brain into it again) murders perpetrated by the revolutionary appliance forces led by bolshevik trucks. With the help of the evil comet, pop machines learn to fire soda cans at their oppressors, hair curlers can somehow wipe that smarmy grin off of teen princesses, and pinball machines learn the secret of electrocution from their cousins on death row. Almost all of it is implausible.
Except the trucks. My beloved, fake blood-soaked, growling trucks. After the initial gore tour, the movie gets on a more interesting track (or interstate): it moves the action to a single location (a truck stop) with a single group of characters (the shmoes at the truck stop), who we don't particularly care for. In fact, the only character that I liked in the least bit was the Green Goblin truck. Now that the movie has narrowed the action and humanized the conflict instead of dealing in megadeaths, we hope that the film doesn't blow its chance like a Buffalo Bills field goal kicker.
Guess what, dear reader, it does. With cheese ball melodrama and cliched deus ex machina, the film manages to take a fairly interesting premise an exploit it like a trained killer whale. It tries to touch on the thought-provoking aspects of our technological society turning against us as the waitress cries, "We maaaade yoooouu!" The machine gun toting army vehicle replies, "Just like the cruddy cherry pie special you ordered from Sara Lee, baby," and blows her to smithereens. So much for philosophy.
So how do our heroes get out of this predicament? With the small arsenal that the owner's been stocking just incase those pesky cockroaches get out of line. Thankfully, this arsenal includes a bazooka and several heavy machine gun that heroically minded parolee Emilio Estevez can use to blow the cr@p out of the toilet paper truck and friends.
I won't say that this flick is completely worthless. I do get a perverse joy out of rooting for the Peterbilt army as they crush the puny humans. But I go into it every time ignoring my wife's Jimminy Cricket-like voice of reason as she takes one look at my little celluloid Hershey bar and realizes that this is not a quality film viewing experience.
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