1986 sci-fi horror movie
Rating: 10/20 (Josh: 4/20; Fred: 3/20; Libby: 9/20; Jeremy: 18/20; Johnny: 1/20)
Plot: Earth's submerged in comet tail dust and there are unseen aliens. Somehow, this all adds up to a bunch (but not all) of the machines coming alive and attacking people. Folks holed up in a truck stop try to keep from being killed by a bunch of trucks.
Stephen King, a guy who could be accused of writing B-novels, wasn't attempting to make high art here. He's making a B-movie, and with its darkly comedic moments, its fearlessness, it's balls-to-the-fucking-wall attitude, some cool crazy machine special effects, a solid and slightly-insane sci-fi B-movie premise, a fair share of blood, and some silly characters portrayed by people who can't act, it successfully entertains exactly like you'd think a movie from a first-time director who was admittedly "coked out of his mind" would. Turn your brain off with this one. There's an attempt to explain why the machines become so destructive and murderous, but it doesn't make any sense at all. Aliens? Comets? And why do a lot of the non-truck machines--lawn mowers, ice cream trucks, steam rollers, Walkmen, wheeled platforms with machine guns mounted on them (What the hell, by the way?), soft drink machines--come to life while cars and other things don't? And why do the mindless machines even decide to work together, and how do they communicate? It's not exactly a well-thought out story, but that's not a problem because there's a truck with a fucking giant goblin face on the front of it. And there are explosions! And there's a scene where a child is run over by a steam roller! And there's Emilio Estevez! When the hero of the movie is Emilio Estevez, you can be sure that you'll eventually be rooting for the inanimate objects to kill everybody. And that goes for every Emilio Estevez movie, including that one where the kids play hockey, not just movies where trucks have fucking giant goblin heads on the front of them. Estevez is one of the more capable actors in the movie. My favorite character might have been a guy whose voice is often heard over the other characters saying obvious things. "The truck stop is on fire." That sort of thing. I'm not even sure the character exchanges actual dialogue in the movie. He just gets all these asides. But my favorite character and worst acting performance in a movie filled with crappy performances is Ellen McElduff as the waitress Wanda June, a character who gets two separate rants where she tries to hammer home a theme for this movie. "We made you!" she screams. "We made you!" Or maybe there's no theme at all. Anyway, I think she and other actors in this must have dipped into King's cocaine supply when he was off watching dailies or something. One more thing about Stephen King--he refers to his own movie here as a "moron movie" and that he didn't know what he was doing and will never direct again. I just love how part of his reason for doing this in the first place was because he'd seen other people (you know, like that hack Stanley Kubrick) mess up so much and wanted to show them how it was done. Well done, Stephen King. I do think this is better, mostly because it's sneakily humorous, than a person might expect, but I'd agree that it's a "moron movie." At times, it feels like he's letting the child inside him make all the decisions, right down to the size of the explosions, allowing the characters to have a rocket launcher and a seemingly limitless supply of ammunition, and including only music by AC/DC. The latter worked pretty well, however.
One more note: I was 12 or 13 when this movie came out. My dad took me to a video store and let me pick out something to watch before taking me to his house for the weekend. Usually, he just picked things out which is why I had to watch things like The Sand Pebbles or The Spirit of St. Louis as a little kid. Turns out that he was right in not giving me a shot at picking out movies because this is the type of shit that I picked out. And it's really the first movie I can remember watching where I thought, "This is a really bad movie. Like, seriously, this is really bad. Why was this made?" I'd been bored by movies before and hated movies, but I can't remember a movie I watched before this that I thought was just plain bad. It might be my first good-bad movie experience actually.
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