emilio estevez

poster

Stephen King stories have been adapted into countless films and television series. Some of them are good, a lot of them are bad, a few of them are great, and some aren’t even worth talking about. Opinions vary on which films fit which category with King himself disagreeing with most.

In 1986 for the first (and last) time Stephen King actually adapted one of his own stories for a film. Based on his short story Trucks, King wrote the screenplay and directed Maximum Overdrive. It bombed at the box office and is generally considered to be lousy in pretty much every way.

I’ve become a pretty big Stephen King fan over the last few years, and have tried to watch a lot of the adaptations of his work. I knew I needed to watch this at some point, but I tended to believe the critics on this one and kept putting it off.

But since it is the Awesome ’80s in April, I decided to give it a go.

I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but I had no idea how insanely incompetent it was going to be.

One can forgive a first-time director like Stephen King (and especially one who has no training in filmmaking) for not banging it out of the park, but you’d think a guy who has written a lot of wonderful stories, would know a thing or two about writing. But the script is just as bad as the direction. Maybe he just didn’t know the difference between writing for the screen and writing for the page.

The bare bones of the story are actually interesting (and most of it seems to have come from that short story – which I haven’t read). Extra-terrestrial forces pass by Earth causing all electronics to become sentient, and murderous. Several people get trapped at a truck stop by a bunch of semi-trucks bent on their destruction.

Technology becoming sentient and trying to destroy mankind is not a new idea, but it can be a good one in the right hands. I especially like the idea of big trucks attacking people. And I love a good people trapped in an enclosed space story. With a better script and a good director this film could have been cool.

King has admitted to having a cocaine addiction at the time, and he was still deep in his alcoholic phase, so no doubt that affected the production.

An example of how this film works. At the start of the film, the controls to a draw bridge come alive, raising the bridge when cars are on it. I swear the number of cars on the bridge at any given time changes, depending on the shot. The height to which the bridge is raised changes as well. Sometimes we’ll have a shot in which the bridge has just been raised to a slight angle, but then we’ll get shots of cars spinning their wheels trying to keep from sliding backward, while other cars slide into the trucks behind them. A wide shot will then show the bridge all the way up. Then it will switch to barely having been raised. There is no tension, it isn’t at all scary.

I can see King writing that scene. As a novelist, he’d take pages and pages to tell that part of the story. We’d get lots of details. We’d know several of the characters. We’d get a sense of the terror. There would be gory details of someone getting smashed up. But as a director, it feels like he didn’t know how to get those details cinematically. He didn’t know the types of shots he’d need or how to put them together.

The entire movie is like that. It feels cheap. Like some bad B-movie, you’d see late at night on cable TV. In part, I suspect this is intentional. I can see King trying to make a B-movie. The kind he might have watched when he was growing up. But those movies have an energy to them that is fun to watch. Maximum Overdrive is a dud from start to finish.

young guns movie poster

I was 12 or 13 when I first watched Young Guns. I can’t remember now if that first watch was in the theater or when it came out on VHS tape. Wherever it was, I loved it. I watched it many times after that first viewing as a young teen and even into my college years. It was probably the first western I ever watched. Me and my friends endlessly quoted it.

I remember my uncle, who was a huge western fan (he used to always tell us that we liked westerns too – because Star Wars was just a western in space) did not like Young Guns. He didn’t like it because it wasn’t historically accurate and it portrayed Billy the Kid as a hero and he was really an outlaw and a vicious killer.

At some point, I stopped watching it. Never intentionally, I don’t think, just one of those things. I bought it and the sequel on DVD but let it gather dust on my shelves. Somewhere in my cinephile film snob years I did rewatch them both and decided they were bad, that they were not good movies.

But this being Westerns in March month I decided to dust it off and give it another try. On a technical level, it isn’t great, but it is still a pretty fun ride.

My uncle was wrong. It is surprisingly historically accurate. At least on a plot level. Billy the Kid was taken in by John Tunstall and his regulators. Tunstall was murdered by the Murphy gang and this did cause a war between the two factions. The regulators were deputized for a time and then became outlaws. I’m not a historian and I’m sure there are any number of embellishments, but from what I’ve read it gets the basic story right.

The movie mostly comes from Billy’s point of view which naturally makes us root for him, and Emilio Estevez is too charming an actor to make him a villain. But it doesn’t shy away from his ruthlessness. When Billy and the regulators become deputies and are supposed to arrest the men responsible for Tunstall’s murder, Billy gets his revenge in blood. At one point he shoots a man at point-blank range and the camera moves in close to Charlie Sheen’s face (he plays Billy’s compatriot) as the dead man’s blood splatters all over it. Billy often seems unhinged and takes great glee in violence (his friends periodically note that he seems quite crazy).

As a teenager, I overlooked these things and will admit to finding him heroic. But watching the movie now I recognize the film doesn’t look away from his violent tendencies.

It is avery 1980s western. Some call it the Brat Pack western as it stars the aforementioned Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, plus Lou Diamond Phillips, Keifer Sutherland, and Dermot Mulroney. The soundtrack is filled with synthesizers and big guitars, and there are some bright filters used in the credit sequence. All of this feels quite dated and the writing doesn’t do it any favors (though it is quite quotable.)

So I guess I’ve come full circle on it. I loved it as a teenager, hated it as a younger adult and now I can recognize its flaws but also appreciate it as an enjoyable entertainment.