Maximum Overdrive

[Quasqueton]

I've caught a glimpse of the old 80's movie, Maximum Overdrive (based on Stephen King writing) on TV nearly half a dozen times in many, many years. I have never seen the ending of the movie. It was on yesterday afternoon, and I was determined to see the whole thing for once. (It is a terribly bad movie, but strangely engrossing.) But again, I was unable to see it to its conclusion.

I've seen the beginning just a couple times, and the middle parts more, but never the ending. Yesterday, I saw as much as ever, up to the point where the humans were filling the gas tanks of the long line of trucks (with the machine-gun-flatbed threatening them).

Someone, please, tell me: How does Maximum Overdrive end? It is driving me crazy.

Quasqueton

 

[Mog Elffoe]

The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.

Or something like that.

 

[WayneLigon]

Someone, please, tell me: How does Maximum Overdrive end? It is driving me crazy.

Prepare for ... well, suckage is probably too strong a word. It's just lame.

The survivors from the truck stop get away to the marina, and the 'green goblin' truck magically tracks them there and manages to run down one of the truckers. Emilio Estevez shoots the truck with a rocket launcher, which stops it. The group gets on a boat and leaves. An epilog states that a Russian 'weather satillite' used it's armament of lasers and nuclear missiles (that is not a misprint) to 'destroy a UFO' - wasn't the effect suppossedly caused by us passing through the tail of a comet? Yes. So this is a completely new 12th hour plot twist? Yes. Then it states that Earth passes out of the comet tail as predicted (in the opening exposition scene), and everything presumably returns to normal. It ends with the little tagline "The survivors of the Dixie Boy are still survivors."

Now the fact that this film was in fact directed by the author of the story it borrows from is nothing short of criminal

I loved the original story, Trucks. Ending to it: The few people to make it out of the truck stop realize that now-automated factories will continue to spit out new vehicles and other things with motors. They are going to basically have to go back to the caves, and the main character speculates on teaching their children by firelight: this is the moon god, this is the sun god, this is an 18-wheel semi overwhelming a hunter. He looks up at the fighter planes leaving contrails in the sky. "I wish I could believe there were people in them".

 

[Quasqueton]

The survivors from the truck stop get away to the marina, and the 'green goblin' truck magically tracks them there and manages to run down one of the truckers. Emilio Estevez shoots the truck with a rocket launcher, which stops it. The group gets on a boat and leaves. An epilog states that a Russian 'weather satillite' used it's armament of lasers and nuclear missiles (that is not a misprint) to 'destroy a UFO' - wasn't the effect suppossedly caused by us passing through the tail of a comet? Yes. So this is a completely new 12th hour plot twist? Yes. Then it states that Earth passes out of the comet tail as predicted (in the opening exposition scene), and everything presumably returns to normal. It ends with the little tagline "The survivors of the Dixie Boy are still survivors."

Thank you.

This movie would be so very much fun to nitpick to death (there are some *very* big nits). Please tell me they at least got on a *sail* boat and not a motorized one. But then again, cars didn't seem to be coming to life against humans, so maybe small boats were still inanimate too.

Some funny concepts in the movie: The animated ice cream truck with blood splattered on its grill from running down children in the streets. And the animated lawmower starting up and chasing that boy. Firing a LAW rocket launcher from the hip. Terrible, terrible Southern accents.

One thing that always attracted me to this movie is the fact that it was filmed in Wilmington, NC, where I lived for about 6 years. Friends that came to visit me on occasion always wanted to drive over the bridge from the beginning of the movie.

Quasqueton

 

[Fajitas]

An epilog states that a Russian 'weather satillite' used it's armament of lasers and nuclear missiles (that is not a misprint) to 'destroy a UFO' - wasn't the effect suppossedly caused by us passing through the tail of a comet? Yes. So this is a completely new 12th hour plot twist? Yes.

To be fair, I do seem to recall a scene where Emilio Estevez speculates that aliens might have directed the comet at Earth so that the machines would kill all the humans, thereby allowing the aliens to re-colonize the now uninhabited planet.

Good lord, I can't believe I just leapt to the defense of *Maximum Overdrive*. >shudder<

 

[Crothian]

Did anyone watch Trucks, the remake of this from the 90's?? I've never seen it but was curious if it was any different or even better?

 

[Rackhir]

It 'tis a very silly movie, not to mention a not very imaginative knock off of the original story by Theodore Sturgeon? called Killdozer. I've always found it to be fundamentally silly when you have things in movies that make things move when there is no way to make them move. IE. cables lashing out and wraping around characters or in this case things like the mirrors turning themselves and it's not like they were powered mirrors either.

Trucks was not an improvement. I have not seen most of Maximum Overdrive, so I can't be exactly sure, but I get the impression that it was simplified and removed a lot of the non-core plot bits, like machines killing people elsewhere. The ending is more of a "shocker" ending where they had planned to get picked up by a helicopter. They get to the meeting point, manage to hop into the chopper, just ahead of the last surviving truck and fly off to safety... Only to discover *SPOILER* Beware I can't remember how to use the spoiler tags.



















The helicopter is flying its self!!!

Betcha didn't see that coming!