Stephen King admitted that he and others used a LOT of cocaine when working on Maximum Overdrive. As far as I can tell Mr. King had nothing to do with this movie, though the reliance on cocaine is still unconfirmed.
A father and daughter travel together to visit Lunar Nevada to check out some of the sites. A couple stops in to rest on their long trip across country. In this small town in Nevada, a man in his junk yard was just murdered…by a truck.
Ray and his son Logan run a truck stop with the help of a family friend George in Lunar Nevada. As customers start showing up, driving trucks, more things start going wrong. A bit further down the road a truck nearly smashes into a car on the highway, while yet another truck carrying toxic chemicals barrels off the road, hitting a transformer and exploding. As the toxic fumes poor into the sky, local law enforcement tells everyone to “just hang on.”
Trucks is a (somehow) lower budget movie than Maximum Overdrive, and it shows. The bulk of their budget was easily spent on pyrotechnics and a helicopter rental. None of it was spent on casting, or acting classes. Originally made for TV, there are a lot of the usual horror staples that are NOT present. It’s a tough movie to watch, to say the least.
There aren’t many redeemable moments in Trucks, and that’s disappointing. The one hilariously terrible moment comes when a HAZMAT team shows up to clean up the chemical spill. They are getting ready for the job when one of the suits that is hooked up to a clean air circulator fills with said air. The suit, full of air, grabs an axe and proceeds to chop up two full grown men. A suit… full of air.
Base on the short story of the same name from Stephen King, Trucks feels like something that was maybe five to six pages long. The only thing that Trucks has over Maximum Overdrive is the ending. The way that this ends is far more dark, and given the subject matter, made much more sense. It’s not going to win any awards, or really make it worth seeing, but it’s okay.
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