Three laughs: Maximum Overdrive

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of themselves, and it is an even better pleasure to find some trash that keeps surprising you than watching most quality films. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you can't believe what the film is showing to you. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Director: Stephen King

Stephen King on cocaine is much like any 13-year-old. A massive dork. Nothing else could explain how such an immature movie as Maximum Overdrive could be created. Of course in the 80's, King could do anything and moneymen would be ready with their checkbooks. I'm glad he made this. Much of the movie seems to play like an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, even though somehow this was supposed to be scary in some way.

Basically it's the most clichéd cowboys vs. indians story, with self-driving trucks (lead by a toy store novelty truck with the face of The Green Goblin) serving as the Indians, and Emilio Estevez (straight outta Repo Man) as the straigh-faced cowboy. This film seems to be a major influence on M. Night Shyamalan and his film The Happening, another film which attempted to modernize an old-timey sci-fi B-movie about the tables getting turned on humanity. The both movies had too few genuinely scary ideas and too many campy laugh-out moments and bad acting for anyone to be able to take them seriously. Nevertheless, as cult comedies, these are unbeatable.

Three laughs (SPOILERS!):

1. The first laugh comes in the first scene. This spot is usually used to create an athmosphere of dread and fear in competent horror films. King, however uses first the opening text to explain some mumbo-jumbo about a passing meteor. And then, he himself is seen walking to an ATM under a big banner that says FUCK. The machine doesn't dispense cash, it just tells him he's an asshole. Self-deprecation of the highest order.

2. The next scene is just as funny, as a draw bridge raises unexpectedly and ruins many a people's day. Watermelons get squashed, some guy falls into water and of course cars are crashed in some prime Blues Brothers -like stunts. The funniest thing, however, is seeing the AC/DC truck go, since they are the fellows blasting WHO MADE WHO on the soundtrack.

3. The laughs keep coming when a junior-league coach is killed by a Coke machine shooting cans at his junk and a little kid gets flattened by a self-driving steam roller. I would give it to one stock racial hustler losing at an arcade and letting out an exhausted SHIIIT before the machines first give him a lot of money, then hypnotize him for a bit and then zap him dead. Overly convoluted, don't you think?