Maximum Overdrive is famous for being the only movie Stephen King ever directed, and being bad, but the 1997 TV movie remake Trucks was even worse. In the 1980s, King was high quite a lot of the time, and not on life, but on drugs. That's not meant to be an insult, as King himself is the first to admit the depths of his issues with addiction back then. In addition to being a first-time director, it's rampant cocaine use that King has placed part of the blame on for just how bad Maximum Overdrive ended up.
That's not to say that Maximum Overdrive is unwatchable, far from it in fact. While far from a good film by any conventional standard, King's directorial effort succeeds, likely unintentionally, at being so crazy as to be hilarious, in a laughing at it, not with it, kind of way. There's definitely a good amount of intended humor, but many sequences that seem intended to be frightening are the exact opposite of scary.
Over the years, Maximum Overdrive has become a bit of a cult classic, precisely due to just how cheesy, wacky, and decidedly 1980s it is at every turn. One King adaptation that almost never seems to get mentioned is Trucks, a second version of the same short story from King's Night Shift collection. There's a reason for that.
Trucks, USA's 1997 TV movie adaptation of the Stephen King short story that also inspired Maximum Overdrive, was directed by Chris Thompson, by that point a decades-long veteran of TV directing. As one might imagine, Trucks is a much more competently directed film than Maximum Overdrive, and is arguably better acted as well. It's also played much more seriously, without the wackiness found in King's movie. That sounds like it should make for a better viewing experience, but in actuality, the opposite is true.
Trucks, which definitely does look like a TV movie, sporting a somewhat flat appearance, has none of the spark and entertainment value found in Maximum Overdrive. Even if Maximum Overdrive was fun for all the wrong reasons, it was still really fun. Trucks is just plain boring and unremarkable, and at what should be a fairly lean 95 minutes, feels much longer. It's a chore to sit through, and by the half-way mark, viewers will be pining for crazy stuff like a sentient steamroller plowing over a small child. Trucks' failure just goes to show that while a bad movie can become "so bad it's good," there's little to be done to save a boring effort.
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