D V D C R Y P T

MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE

Directed & Written by Stephen King
Produced by Martha Schumacher
Music by AC/DC
Cast: Emelio Estevez, Pat Hingle, Laura Harrington, Ellen McElduff & Christopher Murney

1986/98 mins/Color/5.1DD
2.35:1/English/US/NTSC Region 1

Review from the Anchor Bay DVD

On June 19th, 1987, at 9:47 a.m. est, the Earth passed into the extraordinarily diffuse tail of Rhea-M, a rogue comet. According to astronomical calculations, the planet would remain in the tail of the comet for the next eight days, five hours, twenty-nine minutes, and twenty-three seconds. MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE is the first, and thank god, only film that famous writer Stephen King ever directed. Just by reading the intro you can already sense that this will be high in the cheeze department. As in the case with most of the film based on King's stories, this one is pretty bad.

Machines are becoming alive and are attacking the humans at an alarming rate. Some survive but most won't. After taking us through various locations around the city the film switch to a Dixie Boy truck stop and from there it pretty much all takes place there. Bill Robinson (played by Emilio Estevez when he was still doing some good movies but not THIS ONE!), is an ex-convict forced to worked at the truck stop, it's there that someone is killed while playing with a video arcade machine and that a waitress is attacked by an electric knife. The people at the truck stop soon realise that something very wrong is happening and that for no reason the machines are attacking them. As the hours passes by, hundreds of 18-wheelers begin circling around the truck stop including one very cool Green Goblin truck. Bill and Wanda (Ellen McElduff) decide that it's time to fight back.

Something very cool could have been made outta this idea of "machines becoming alive and wrecking avock" but King's direction is simply awful, the characters are too one-dimensional, the awful sounds that happens when someone is attacked are simply annoying. Thanks god for the AC/DC music and the Green Goblin truck, otherwise this film is pretty much a waste. For die hard Stephen King fans only i guess.

Supposedly, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE first received a X rating back in '86! I don't know if a version of this was ever released but it would have been nice from Anchor Bay to add them as deleted scenes.

Anchor Bay have done a great job with this disc. The film is nicely presented in it's original 2.35:1 ratio and it is enhanced for 16x9 tv. The colors are nice and sharp, there is no sign of compression or artifacts. Audio wise, we get a very nice 5.1 Doldy Digital track which gives lotta punch to the score by hard rock legend AC/DC. We also have a nice 2.0 Dolby Surround track, both are in English. As for the extras, we get a rather pretencious trailer with King talking about how he will scare us with this film (yeah right!), the trailer is correctly presented at a 2.35:1 ratio. We also get a biography on the man. A commentary track with King and Estevez would have been a big plus to this rather thin package.

Playing in the background in the menus is "You shook me all night long" from AC/DC, when we make a choice the Green Goblin truck smashes the screen, pretty neat. The film is separated in 30 chapters, it comes with an inlay card with the original poster in one side and the chapter stops on the other, the disc comes in a keep case.

Thanks to Anchor Bay

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