I’m watching Maximum Overdrive-one of the worst movies ever made

[Dalek]

This is a very bizarre movie. I'm watching it because I listen to a Stephen King podcast where they talk about a book/movie/show each episode. This was one I never saw.

Stephen King wrote AND directed this movie! It must have been at a time when he was high as a kite because the movie is pretty awful. Also of note-AC/DC did the entire score/soundtrack to the movie and that's actually awesome. It also stars Emilio Estevez and Yeadly Smith-the voice of Lisa Simpson.

The premise is that Earth passes into a comet's trail and the radiation somehow affects all machinery on Earth. Literally anything that's a machine can kill you. Tractor Trailers, kitchen appliances, a Walkman -you name it

Here's a scene where Giancarlo Esposito is electrocuted by an evil arcade game.



Here's a scene where a softball coach is killed by a soda machine that spits cans out at him.



Not soon after one of the softball kids is run over by a steamroller.



You might also remember the villainous tractor trailer with a giant Green Goblin face.

 

[Kard8p3]

cocaine is a helluva drug.

 

[KingBrave]

Cocaine is a helluva drug!

 

[ThereAreFourNaan]

The first 20 - 30 minutes is really fun and has some hilarious kills, but the latter half of the film is sort of just dull, which is the worst thing a bad movie can be. The best kills are mostly in the first 1/3, and so you get that hilarity replaced by more character stuff (and it's really bad character stuff).

 

[Officer Big Mac]

Should have sent the script back to formula

 

[louiedog]

 

[noquarter]

Im pretty sure I saw this in the 90s on at some point and remember nkthing about it except for the VHS box.

 

[thediamondage]

cocaine is a helluva drug.

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to expound on this, stephen king (the prolific author) directed maximum overdrive, the only movie he has ever written and directed, and he admitted years later he was cocained out of his mind during the entire movie production and basically doesn't remember a thing from it.

the 80s and 90s were fantastic from a "how the fuck did that happen? oh yeah, cocaine"

 

[Lari]

I mean, it's pretty bad... but era's bar for "worst movies ever" is pretty soft if i'm being real.

Unlike the movie the trailer is well worth watching.


I'm gonna scare the hell out of you!!!

 

[Dalek]

An ATM machine tells Stephen King he's an asshole.

 

[matrix-cat]

Wonderful story about Stephen King only learning about the 180-degree rule on set after his cameraman told him he was breaking it, and then calling his friends George A. Romero and David Lynch to get their input:

So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.


So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.

Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."

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[Kard8p3]

to expound on this, stephen king (the prolific author) directed maximum overdrive, the only movie he has ever written and directed, and he admitted years later he was cocained out of his mind during the entire movie production and basically doesn't remember a thing from it.

the 80s and 90s were fantastic from a "how the fuck did that happen? oh yeah, cocaine"

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Same story with Cujo, right? he just woke up one morning and there it was written all out with no memory lol

 

[Pineapple Taco]

I loved this movie when I was like 13. I should watch it again. After edibles.

 

[Dalek]

Same story with Cujo, right? he just woke up one morning and there it was written all out with no memory lol

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He did a lot on cocaine. I think he said he doesn't remember writing The Tommyknockers.

 

[mattiewheels]

Cocaine is amazing. Consequently, David Bowie was deep in a cocaine problem and he wrote Station To Station, one of the great albums. This thing can go either way.

 

[Dalek]

Wonderful story about Stephen King only learning about the 180-degree rule on set after his cameraman told him he was breaking it, and then calling his friends George A. Romero and David Lynch to get their input:

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What a great article.


Question: What effect were you aiming for in Maximum Overdrive?

King: I wanted it to move fast. It's a wonderfully moronic picture in that sense. It's a really illiterate picture in a lot of ways. There isn't a lot of dialogue in it. It's fast. A lot of things explode. It's very profane, very vulgar, quite violent in some places. We're going to have trouble with the ratings board, I guess.

 

[B.K.]

There are much worse movies than Maximum Overdrive.

 

[Dalek]

There are much worse movies than Maximum Overdrive.

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"One of"

 

[nihilence]

It's terrible and I love it.

 

[DeliciousSunnyD!]

I'd wanted to see this for years, as a fan of King and stuff from the 1980's. As a kid, I'd continually see this in the Horror section at rental places but never picked it up for whatever reason, always thinking "I'll watch it later".

Saw it a few years ago for the first time and I actually really enjoyed it. It was definitely a movie borne from substance abuse lmao, and the last half is definitely weaker than the first. But I thought it was a pretty fun B movie horror from the 80's.

If you like King and/or things from that decade, you should definitely watch Maximum Overdrive at least once.

 

[Deleted member 6539]

I loved it. It does drag on a bit, but it's still a pretty fun movie. Trucks? Now that was bad and not in a good way.

 

[Galaxea]

The movie is awful but I did love it as a kid. It would be a so bad it's good movie if the second half was more entertaining. The idea wore thin. I guess the cocaine ran low.

 

[Wyman Manderly]

This movie scared the shit out of me as a little kid. Never watched it as a teen or adult, maybe I should give it a gander just for the nostalgia

 

[Dr Scientifico]

"Who Made Who" is a pretty OK AC/DC song, so that's one good thing coming from this movie.

 

[steejee]

It's one of our favorite dumb movies ever. A "So bad it's good" classic.

 

[Memento Mori]

The filming of Maximum Overdrive sounds wild so much so there was a Blacklist script a few years back about it.

Camera assistant Silvia Giulietti offered, "with a very thick Italian accent," this gem: "And he had a kind of a superstition. He had kind of a piece of the underpants of his wife at the belt. It was a kind of mascot. He always say, 'This bring me luck.'"

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[Jedi2016]

I think I've only seen this one once, many years ago. Probably drunk with a bunch of friends, which is the same mindset it was produced in, so I guess it worked.

If you get a chance, though, go back and read the original short story it was based on, "Trucks". It's much more classic creepy-as-fuck Stephen King than the movie is.

 

[HStallion]

Stephen King was always a better actor than he was anything else.

 

[Hopfrog]

Imagine a rebooted Maximum Overdrive today with a focus on drones instead of semi-trucks.

"We made you!"

Timely.

 

[CatAssTrophy]

I think it fits in with the "great idea, poor execution" framework most King movies fall into, but it definitely stretches that concept to it's limits. I'd be down for a remake but it would need a lot of overhauling and rethinking of core ideas and diverge from the book greatly.

Tommyknockers was one of the better movies though, and I'd love a remake of some sort. I feel like if it had gotten just a slightly higher budget and didn't have that "filmed with TV quality cameras" feel to it (which most of his 90's movies did), it could have been fantastic.

 

[Doomguy Fieri]

Maximum Overdrive is better than at least 1/3rd of the Star Wars movies.

 

[Jarrod38]

Curtis!!!!!!!!

 

[Sketchsanchez]

Hard disagree.

It's actually my favorite Steven King work, God bless

 

[Mars People]

It's still super weird that Marvel signed off on using one of their characters for this.

 

[wenis]

Nah that movie fucking rocks.

 

[BrucCLea13k87]

I worked with and I'm friends with Jock Brandis, who worked very closely with Stephen King on the movie. It's actually filmed in Wilmington, NC Which is my hometown. Here's his IMDb page https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0104680/

Jock was a gaffer for many legendary films like Blue Velvet, Videodrome, Scanners and more. He's good friends with David Cronenberg. The stories he told about this are pretty hilarious. King was super high on cocaine the entire time as everyone knows. But after a while he just didn't really do much and would pass out halfway through the day due to crashing after his coke binges. The crew basically completed the project without him there half the time.

Jock has a cameo at the beginning, he's the truck driver that almost gets smashed when the bridge opens up at the beginning of the film. Apparently the stunt went awry and Jock almost got killed. After the take, King applauded Jock for having a great reaction. Little did he know it was abject terror.

Jock has some legendary stories about films. One funny thing he shared with me is about Cronenberg's Scanners. (You may know it for the famous head explosion scene. But you should check it out, it's on HBO Max and a part of The Criterion Collection.) If you look at the IMDb page of the movie, there's some trivia about how how Cronenberg said it was his most frustrating film he's ever made. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081455/trivia?tab=tr&item=tr1449676

Part of that was because of the lead actress, Jennifer O'Neill, who was a big pain in the butt on set. She would constantly fight with Cronenberg and insisted that she do her own make up. When she showed up to set after doing her own make up in her trailer, the crew was aghast. As Jock told it to me, she left patches around her eyes much like how Trump looks and looked like a reverse raccoon. After seeing her dailies she demanded to know who was the head electrician on set, which was Jock. She blamed her look on the lighting and demanded that he be fired or she'd walk right off the set and quit. Little did she know that Jock had begun a great friendship with Cronenberg because of their shared affinity for Italian motorcycles. Jock was working on one to get it repaired for David on the off hours. David had also already set up an actress to replace O'Neill because of the chaos she had been causing up to this point. He told her she can fuck right off, because Jock isn't going anywhere. He called her bluff.

There is so much film history in Wilmington that I really want to make a documentary. Brandon Lee being shot here, Blue Velvet being filmed here. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was made here, the biggest indie movie at that time. Huge TV shows. Hollywood really shaped this little town. It was also supposed to become the Marvel Studio hub after Iron Man 3 was made here, but our shitty Republican governor revoked all of the film incentives during his reign and they moved shop to Atlanta. Fucking sucks.

 

[HStallion]

It's still super weird that Marvel signed off on using one of their characters for this.

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Maybe King bribed them with cocaine

 

[UnderTheKillingSun]

IT HAD A FUCKING GREAT SOUNDTRACK.

 

[Thrill_house]

This is one of those "so bad it's good" movies. Its part horror flick and part comedy. Loved it growing up

 

[UnderTheKillingSun]

Also:

Who Made Who - ACDC is the official soundtrack album for Maximum Overdrive.

Iron Man 2 - The Album ACDC is the official soundtrack album for Iron Man 2.

Both movies feature AC/DC soundtracks, both movies feature Marvel characters, both movies are terrible.

Therefore Maximum Overdrive = Iron Man 2.

 

[KDC720]

King was absolutely high out of his mind when he made this.

I believe he even said his co-director was cocaine or something like that.

 

[Fisty]

Awful movie, but hilarious in its ineptitude.

Amazing soundtrack though

 

[FnordChan]

You can't say that a film with an all AC/DC soundtrack that features death by vending machine, steamrollers versus kids, and a giant Green Goblin mask on an evil semi the worst film ever made. All those things are in the opening post of the thread and clearly prove Maximum Overdrive's greatness!

Meanwhile, having seen the film repeatedly growing up, and having cheerfully revisited it recently, I'm firmly in the "so bad it's good" camp. It's a must-watch for Stephen King fans. Hell, it's easily more entertaining than at least half of the King adaptations out there, probaby more.

 

[Madvin_a]

Trucks? Now that was bad and not in a good way.

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Yeah, stuff like this. It's Maximum Overdrive minus a budget.

 

[PlateOfShrimp]

The soda can and steam roller deaths are the only thing I remember. If the whole movie was like that, it'd be a winner, but I remember it really dragging after the initial chaos.

 

[Dalek]

I worked with and I'm friends with Jock Brandis, who worked very closely with Stephen King on the movie. It's actually filmed in Wilmington, NC Which is my hometown. Here's his IMDb page https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0104680/

Jock was a gaffer for many legendary films like Blue Velvet, Videodrome, Scanners and more. He's good friends with David Cronenberg. The stories he told about this are pretty hilarious. King was super high on cocaine the entire time as everyone knows. But after a while he just didn't really do much and would pass out halfway through the day due to crashing after his coke binges. The crew basically completed the project without him there half the time.

Jock has a cameo at the beginning, he's the truck driver that almost gets smashed when the bridge opens up at the beginning of the film. Apparently the stunt went awry and Jock almost got killed. After the take, King applauded Jock for having a great reaction. Little did he know it was abject terror.

Jock has some legendary stories about films. One funny thing he shared with me is about Cronenberg's Scanners. (You may know it for the famous head explosion scene. But you should check it out, it's on HBO Max and a part of The Criterion Collection.) If you look at the IMDb page of the movie, there's some trivia about how how Cronenberg said it was his most frustrating film he's ever made. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081455/trivia?tab=tr&item=tr1449676

Part of that was because of the lead actress, Jennifer O'Neill, who was a big pain in the butt on set. She would constantly fight with Cronenberg and insisted that she do her own make up. When she showed up to set after doing her own make up in her trailer, the crew was aghast. As Jock told it to me, she left patches around her eyes much like how Trump looks and looked like a reverse raccoon. After seeing her dailies she demanded to know who was the head electrician on set, which was Jock. She blamed her look on the lighting and demanded that he be fired or she'd walk right off the set and quit. Little did she know that Jock had begun a great friendship with Cronenberg because of their shared affinity for Italian motorcycles. Jock was working on one to get it repaired for David on the off hours. David had also already set up an actress to replace O'Neill because of the chaos she had been causing up to this point. He told her she can fuck right off, because Jock isn't going anywhere. He called her bluff.

There is so much film history in Wilmington that I really want to make a documentary. Brandon Lee being shot here, Blue Velvet being filmed here. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was made here, the biggest indie movie at that time. Huge TV shows. Hollywood really shaped this little town. It was also supposed to become the Marvel Studio hub after Iron Man 3 was made here, but our shitty Republican governor revoked all of the film incentives during his reign and they moved shop to Atlanta. Fucking sucks.

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I love to read stuff like this! Thanks! I see he also worked on the Dead Zone, one of my favorite movies.

 

[Richiek]

Kinda blows my mind that Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson) is in this.

 

[RestEerie]

AC/DC rocks though and seeing an ATM machine calling Stephen King an asshole is always funny.

 

[FormatCompatible]

he was cocained out of his mind during the entire movie production and basically doesn't remember a thing from it.

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He was coked out of his mind in the freaking trailer lol. He didn't give a fuck and I love it.

 

[Biteren]

this is one of those stupidly awesome movies you catch on a sunday afternoon.