Maximum Overdrive

A group of people try to survive when machines start to come alive and become homicidal.

• Director: Stephen King
• Genre:Action / Horror / Sci-Fi / Thriller
• Runtime:98 minutes

Cast

Emilio Estevez : Bill Robinson
Pat Hingle : Hendershot
Laura Harrington: Brett
Yeardley Smith : Connie
John Short : Curtis

The movie opens with a shot of Earth surrounded by green fog and states that on June 19, 1987, apocalyptic mayhem ensues when a strange radiation from a closely passing rogue comet, Rhea-M, causes all manner of mechanical devices and electrical appliances across the planet Earth to become sentient, self-aware and genocidal for eight days, twenty-nine minutes, and twenty three seconds.

Marauding big rig trucks trap a small group of people in a fictional roadside truck stop called “The Dixie Boy” just outside Wilmington, North Carolina. When the trucks begin demanding more than blood (they order the humans to pump diesel), the Dixie Boy survivors realize they will become enslaved by their own machines, and they must escape to Haven Island just off the coast of North Carolina, on which no vehicles or machines were permitted.

Bill Robinson (Emilio Estevez) rallies the survivors; they use a cache of guns found hidden under the diner. The trucks fight back themselves, at one point human fatalities result from an M274 “Mule” firing its mounted M60 machine gun into the building.

Eventually the survivors escape to the docks where the featured Green Goblin semi kills one more trucker. The semi is destroyed and the humans sail off to safety.

At the end of the movie, a perfunctory title card strongly implies extraterrestrials were behind the homicidal machines as part of a preliminary invasion. The machines are stopped and the invasion ends with the destruction of a UFO by a Soviet “weather satellite” equipped with nuclear missiles and laser cannons. Read more

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