In Stephen King’s long and prolific career, he has directed exactly one film. When asked why he never directed more, he responded: “Just watch Maximum Overdrive.”
The logline, dreamed up near the zenith of King’s infamous cocaine addiction, is this: when earth drifts through the tail of a passing comet, all machinery on the planet becomes sentient and intensely homicidal.
The mainstream adoption of the internet of things and the onset of generative AI has us thinking about sentience and ethics in new and scary ways, so there is a decidedly retro charm to the awakening of motorized and electrical machinery, still roughly a decade before the internet would revolutionize the world.
There is plenty of campy promise in the film’s nutty first act. An ATM calls King an asshole in an opening scene cameo. A drawbridge causes a multi-car disaster on a river. A psychopathic soda machine takes out a little league team as they run screaming. A blood-covered lawnmower sputters to life to pursue Deke (Holter Graham) down an eerily quiet neighborhood street.
When a collection of human survivors hole up in the Dixie Boy truck stop—besieged by a circling pack of murderous trucks—the momentum of those opening scenes (and the inventive silliness offered by the premise) downshifts into something like King’s The Mist: a psychological chamber piece without much of an idea where to go next.
Political commentary about our destructive interdependence on fossil fuels is right there for the taking, but I’m pretty sure that King mostly wanted an excuse to flatten people with semi-trucks. When you consider King’s ripping substance abuse, his utter lack of directorial know-how, and the language barrier between him and his own DP (Armando Nannuzzi, who would lose an eye in an on-set accident and sue King for $18 million)—it’s no surprise that the production was a steaming mess.
Still, it’s good for some campy mayhem, and it has amassed a modest-yet-loyal cult following. Maximum Overdrive is currently streaming on Pluto TV.