Adaptation Insanity: The one that readapted Maximum Overdrive

 

Title: Trucks

What Year?: 1997

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’m trying to scrape together a lineup for Halloween, and that brought me back to this so far barely started feature on adaptations. That, in turn, brought me to a whole lot of maybe pile material from everyone’s “favorite” author, Stephen King. (See Sleepwalkers, fungghh.) As I surveyed the material at hand, one stood out that would otherwise have gone under my even more abortive feature on TV movies. It’s one King adaptation that has stayed obscure even though it’s been readily available for a very long time, and as a bonus, it’s based on the same source material as the only film the author directed. So do we have undiscovered gold, or a buried cat spoor? Would I be writing about it if it was that simple? Here’s Trucks, a made-for-TV film that has just a little more under the hood than one might think.

Our story begins with an old jalopy that takes out its owner. We then move to a little townlet with a truck stop and a lodge for a sightseeing tour, where a man and his son, a veteran and his spunky daughter and a vaguely mysterious lady guide meet up. While the domestic awkwardness unfolds, they notice several vehicles moving around strangely, with no explanation or context beyond vague official broadcasts about chemical spills in the area. They soon find themselves under siege by trucks that have no drivers, seemingly led by a meat truck that locked its driver in the freezer. The dad becomes the leader of our little band as they plan to fight back. But soon it becomes clear that the machines don’t just want the humans dead- they want to be their masters!

Trucks was a 1997 made-for-television movie aired by the USA cable network. It was the second adaptation of Stephen King’s short story of the same name, following the 1986 theatrical  film Maximum Overdrive directed by King. The film was produced by Trimark Pictures, a company also responsible for distributing Dead Alive, with New Zealand film maker Chris Thomson as director. King and screenwriter Brian Taggert (see… Of Unknown Origin???) shared credit for the script. The cast was led by TV/ character actor Timothy Busfield as the dad Ray and Brenda Bakke as the guide Hope. Unusually, the film was rated by the MPAA, which gave it PG-13. The movie was released on VHS. It is currently available for free streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

For my experiences, I watched this one as a video rental around 2005, after reading the story but before watching Maximum Overdrive. At the time, I regarded it positively, even finding favorable comparisons to the theatrical film once I had seen both. Since then, I have come back to both at irregular intervals, and what I have come to see is equal and opposite extremes. Maximum Overdrive was an exercise in big-budget 1980s excess, exacerbated by a creator with no experience and unlimited creative control. The present film, on the other hand, is a clearly competent production restrained for better or worse by sub-B production values and “mainstream” network sensibilities. In many ways, the most appropriate frame of reference is the remake of Night of the Living Dead, which can only highlight the futility of comparison. What we have is truly a case of two films with nothing in common except source material, and it’s impressive enough that both have retained some measure of relevance.

Moving forward, the most significant further comparison between Maximum Overdrive and Trucks is that the former was action/ adventure where the latter is unequivocally horror. By any appraisal, what modest merit the present film has is owed to this decision. There is no vision of a wider apocalypse here; indeed, from what we do know, the authorities of the wider world are either unaware of the unfolding situation or so far able to contain it. This allows the focus to remain even more than in the original story on characters in isolation and growing despair. What’s different is that the individual buildings are not particularly claustrophobic. Space is ample, and there are windows that give a good view of the surroundings. On the other hand, the structures are so old and dilapidated that the trucks easily smash through whenever they try, quickly removing any appearance of safety. The key ingredient, of course, is human characters we can like or at least find believable. In those terms, this comes close to trying too hard. The characters are more fleshed out then the ciphers of the story, yet the drawn-out backstories do not make them any more vivid or sympathetic than the rogues’ gallery of Maximum Overdrive. On the balance, we at least have competent actors delivering decent dialogue, greatly helped by Busfield. I have to give a particular shoutout for his performance in the final shot of the film (definitely up for the “one scene”). In a more routine film, the unsurprising reveal could have led to a freeze frame of a shrieking scream queen; from our lead, we do not see fear or even surprise, only resignation.

Then, of course, there are the machines, and this is where the most definite improvements emerge. The goofy gimmick of the goblin truck is replaced by ordinary, working machines that are vastly more frightening. One can draw some sense of personality out of the individual machines, strikingly varied in size, age and roles, though none can match the sheer malevolence of the beat-up old clunker in Duel. It’s most intriguing to see the group playing literal cat and mouse. The usual trade-off is that it quickly becomes obvious when the machines are just messing with someone they have no intention of killing, and the cop-outs avoid the kind of gore that might push the limits of television. (And this was cable, dammit…) By my long-running rant, however, the nuance of a “monster” is potentially unnerving in itself, and the payoff here is better than usual as their ultimate plan becomes clear. Then there are moments of pure brutality, egregiously the surreal attack of a toy dump truck on a mailman (yes, you read that right) and a final kill where the lead truck wipes out a building as collateral damage. We get one more inscrutable moment in the finale when the same machine tries to wipe out the protagonists for no strategic reason, as if willing to destroy out of pure spite. This is what you get when variable behavior is used for more than plot armor.

Now it’s time for the one scene, and this is where I’ll mention that I went through a whole viewing in the course of this review just to stick to my own rules. Right about the middle, I was actually waiting for the sequence that was always going to be here, and still taken a little by surprise. We see two cannon-fodder government types who have already popped in and out, on their way to a chemical spill that might otherwise be written off as a cover story. One decides to put on his hazmat suit, a piece of gear that looks for all the world like a human-shaped padded envelope, leaving his companion in the cab. As the other guy finishes some inconsequential task, a second suit starts to inflate. Sure enough, when fully inflated, the suit starts to move of its own volition. The guy in the cab doesn’t seem to notice, until he sees his colleague outside. There’s just a moment to be surprised before the animated suit strikes with an axe already on hand. We then cut to the suited goon as he returns to the rear of the truck. He looks up at the bloody apparition, and promptly asks what he is doing. Of course, he gets the axe, and there’s a certain impressiveness as the phantom dispatches him, with far more force than strictly needed yet no sign of savagery or sadism. And then the suit returns to its place. Even compared to Maximum Overdrive, it’s a bizarre and totally random moment, neither foreshadowed nor figuring in any subsequent event, which is exactly how a movie like this stays in your memory two decades later.

In closing, I come to the rating. What it really comes down to is that this is one I would simply ignore under normal circumstances, especially in a feature with my “revised” rating scale in effect. Even with the points I have laid out in its favor, this is just plain cheap. On top of that, its greatest significance in genre history is to show just how far feature-length TV movies had fallen after peaks as recent as 12:01. Yet, as I postulated at the beginning, it still manages to be just a little more than it should have been, and it is clear that I’m not the only one who remembers it. For that, I can give it my attention and just a little respect. Forward until dawn!