Vehicular Revenge

In 1986 the world was blessed with Maximum Overdrive. It’s a terrible movie, but one that is oddly charming in its own way. A film about every machine, vehicle, and other industrial objects all going murder crazy, attempting to kill the humans simply for the pleasure of it, it’s certainly something. The film was based on the Stephen KingRising to fame with the release of his first book, Carrie, Stephen King is one of the most prolific, and most successful, American authors (in any genre, not just horror). short story, “Trucks”, and it marks the one and only time King directed a film. He’s written on a few, produced many, but Maximum Overdrive was the only time he sat in the director’s chair. That’s because the movie bombed hard and King said no one ever wanted him to attempt to do it again.

I’m not suddenly going to come out as a Maximum Overdrive defender, mind you. The film isn’t great, and it really struggles to make the concept of sentient, killer trucks scary. But King did a decent job on that film and the movie, bad as it is, can still be watchable at times. There are far worse films out there, and as it so happens there’s even a worse adaptation of “Trucks” because, apparently, while no one wanted to give King a second shot as director there was some production studio that thought, “it wasn’t the short story that was the problem. Let’s do that again!”

Produced by Trimark Pictures and released directly to USA Network, 1997’s Trucks is an abysmal production. Trucks is what would happen if you took Maximum Overdrive, removed all the fun and silly content, and then left all the boring shit that everyone complained about from the previous film. Self-serious, melodramatic, tedious, and stilted, Trucks fails to deliver anything even remotely resembling an enjoyable experience. Maximum Overdrive might have been stupid, but it was also a delightful good time. Trucks is just stupid.

The film opens with a familiar setup. We’re introduced to our cast of characters – gas station owner Ray Porter (Timothy Busfield), his son Logan (Brendan Fletcher), and the woman running the cabins on their shared property, Hope Gladstone (Brenda Bakke) – all getting ready for their day. Hope has guests coming in from out of town, some she has to go into the city to pick up, including aging hippie Jack (Jay Brazeau), and bickering father and daughter Thad (Roman Podhora) and Abby (Amy Stewart). It’s just another bright and sunny day out in Lunar, Nevada.

Things take a turn, though, as Hope drives her guests back to the cabins. They find a truck out in the middle of the road near a dump, and when they investigate they find that the dump owner is dead, having been run over. The truck they noticed then comes to life, smashing Hope’s van before driving off. They get picked up by Ray, but as they drive back to their land other trucks spring up, going off on their own, attempting to murder people. Somehow, maybe due to a government chemical, the machines have come to life and they want to kill. Our heroes have to find a way to survive lest they, too, become roadkill.

I guess a mark in the film’s favor is that no one will ever accuse Trucks of being too silly. While Maximum Overdrive had characters dying from improbable deaths, such as via a malfunctioning pinball machine or from a particularly murderous soda machine, the killers in Trucks are all, well, trucks. Large, hulking, and slow, and there’s never any doubt that these machines could kill someone if they were unlucky enough to get in the truck’s way. Most of the film sticks to the idea that these hulking vehicles are deadly, so don’t piss them off.

But even that statement isn’t entirely true because the film does have some very silly kills, they just don’t happen to be part of the main plot of the movie. It’s pretty clear that this film was developed with a TV-safe cut as well as a harder, gorier cut for home video. To accomplish this, all the violent, bloody deaths happen outside the main story, to side characters that have no relation to the main events of the film, like two government investigators, or a powerline technician, or a post man. These guys die in really stupid and silly ways, such as the post man getting murdered by a RC truck. Still a truck, mind you, but probably the least scary one you can think of. These moments are idiotic… but they also introduce at least a little fun into the film, which it desperately needs.

The main story, but comparison, is unimaginably dull. Yes, the characters take their situation seriously, being mindful of the trucks and, for the most part, staying indoors. That only leads to many, many shots of the people watching the trucks driving around in big circles while nothing actually ever happens. They watch the trucks, the trucks watch them. They watch the trucks, the trucks continue to watch them. It’s a back and forth that leaves the film feeling less like it has a story and more like the production team filmed the people for a while, letting them improvise different ways of watching the trucks while the trucks watched them, and then at some point said, “yep, that’s all we need. Let’s quickly end this.”

Needless to say, the trucks in the film aren’t scary. Whether due to poor direction, bad cinematography, or a lack of budget to actually make the stunts feel interesting (likely it’s all three), there’s no energy or horror to the few kills that actually happen in Trucks, especially in the main story. Any time someone is going to get run over it amounts to the same setup. They see the truck, the truck drives at them, and then we cut away to watch the other people watch the person get run over. Everything is bloodless and silly and we don’t get to see much of it at all. Over and over this happens, and at a certain point it all feels so bland and uninteresting.

But the biggest issue I had with the film was the fact that it both tries to tell us why the trucks have come to life and, at the same time, also gives such a half-assed explanation that the film can’t even stick to. The government chemical, we’re led to believe, animated the trucks. If it counts as a truck it turns that vehicle into a death machine. Not cars or vans or other vehicles, mind you. Just trucks. So all the big rigs count, but so to pickups and other light vehicles. Plus, don’t forget that RC truck. These all count because the word “truck” is on them, even though they all have different kinds of motors. But cars, TV sets, lawn mowers, and so many other machines are unaffected.

If it was motors then generators as well as cars and vans would be affected. If it was diesel engines then only big rigs (and some other rare vehicles) would have the issue. But no, all that seems to matter is the word “truck” being on the item and, suddenly, it becomes a murder machine. It’s a dumb way to make a villain, of any kind, because you can almost instantly start picking it apart saying, “so what are the rules for this?” And that would be fine if the film were meant to be silly and the if the rules didn’t really matter (such as in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, where some of the characters immediately point out the flaws in the setting’s own logic), but this film is so self-serious about its setting, by and large, that the more it violates its rules the less invested I became.

Trucks is a bad movie, and not even a fun one. It does the impossible and makes me long for the days of Maximum Overdrive. At least that film had the good sense to be dumb and fun while also being bad. Trucks has none of the fun or enjoyment of the concept baked in, making it the kind of dull, dreadful film you don’t even want to watch once. I still don’t think the idea of sentient trucks is a scary concept, and neither film sold me on that. There is a way, though, to at least make it fun. Trucks fails at even that level, making itself the worst version of this story yet. Thankfully it’s also (so far) the last version we’ve gotten and if we’re lucky it’ll stay that way.