We’re on the highway to heck.
It takes cojones to set out to remake Maximum Overdrive. Then again, the bar is so low, it’s practically a line (of coke) so there’s nowhere to go but up. The original short story, first published in Cavalier in 1973 and later collected in Night Shift, was a tightly wound exercise in helplessness and escalating paranoia. This film version is an exercise in filling a couple of hours of TV schedule as cheaply as possible.
A small group of survivors find themselves trapped in a diner as their own vehicles turn against them and, well, that’s about all he wrote. The original story offered no real explanation, no catharsis, and certainly no hope. It was bleak, efficient, and eerie in the way early King often was. This 1997 adaptation tries to honour that structure but guts the ambiguity, stuffing the runtime with clumsy dialogue, subplots nobody asked for, and a haphazard sense of urgency that flares up and dies off like a knackered battery.
Hope Gladstone (Brenda Bakke) runs a hiking and tourism business out of the remote Area-51 adjacent Nevada town of Lunar but when her latest tour group finds themselves under attack from a driverless truck, she calls in Ray Porter (Timothy Busfield), a recently widowed environmental inspector who relocated to the town with his teenage son, Logan (Brendan Fletcher) for help. Ray manages to get them back to the local diner but once there they find themselves under siege from a convoy of trucks intent on murder.
There’s an awkward tension in Trucks between the desire to be taken seriously and the innate ridiculousness of self-driving homicidal vehicles but it’s not so much inconsistent as indecisive. Does it want to be a survival horror, a conspiracy thriller, or small-town melodrama? It ends up being none of the above, scribbling in the margins rather than ticking any boxes. Characters drop exposition like litter, and the trucks themselves seem to attack not out of malice or mystery, but mostly to get the plot moving again when the script runs out of road.
Crucially, Trucks misjudges what made the original story work. In King’s prose, the lack of motive and the stripped-down setting amplified the existential horror: machines moving without meaning, enforcing servitude in a world suddenly uninterested in human autonomy. That kind of deliberate ambiguity is more difficult to pull off in a movie, but Trucks makes things harder than it needs to be by offering three separate explanations and never committing to any of them: an ecological catastrophe at a nearby chemical plant, a secret experiment at nearby Area 51 or even that old chestnut a “rogue comet”, probably a nod to Maximum Overdrive‘s title cards.
The special effects in Trucks manage to be competent without being especially impressive. CGI is used sparingly, with most of the vehicular havoc done practically, and while it never dazzles, it at least doesn’t embarrass. The cinematography is perfunctory, the editing occasionally abrupt, and the soundtrack forgettable. It feels made for television in the most derisive sense, as if its chief duty was to fill a time slot and however it did that was of secondary importance.
It’s tempting to argue Trucks is more faithful to King’s story than its predecessor, and in the strictest sense that might be true. It avoids outright camp in favour of something more measured but it only really succeeds if you have your eyes firmly on Maximum Overdrive in the rear-view mirror. On its own merits, Trucks is just another pile-up on the Stephen King adaptation highway.
