It is difficult to predict, when polling acquaintances, who has seen Maximum Overdrive and who has never heard of it. Bad movies are in, the same way pencil skirts and wool coats are, fashionable: they never are unpopular per se, but fade to the background of our cultural consciousness until someone makes a ton of noise about discovering them again. But Maximum Overdrive isn’t bad in the way Troll 2 is bad, or The Room: both of those movies lack any sort of narrative cohesion and you can tell, immediately, how much of a bad idea they were after the first scene. The effects are home-made, you have no idea who any of the actors are, and nothing, nothing makes any goddamn sense. Maximum Overdrive, then, doesn’t have the acid-trip logic or that extent of mouth frothing ridiculousness to enjoy widespread revival, but it does have a certain something. “It’s like Speed meets Christine mixed with Roadhouse,” is how I usually try to sell it. Its insanity is focused, convincing. It has charisma, it has style, and it is aggressively pleased with itself until the last frame. It has King, a master of telling stories about normal people in extraordinary situations, just doing their thing until a waking nightmare finds them.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 19:39:20 +0000
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