“There had to be someone driving with their head down, trucks don’t drive by themselves!”

Justin’s rating: Trucks don’t stop for the truck stop

Justin’s review: With the sheer volume of Stephen King material out there, it boggles my mind that anyone feels the need to remake movies already based on his works — especially when the remakes are almost always worse. I guess it didn’t stop some folks in 1997 to look at the cocaine-infused, King-directed insanity of Maximum Overdrive and say, “Ayuh, I reckon we should do that again.”

No, you shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t.

Trucks has long been known to me as that movie with the truly awful — yet memorable — tagline of “U-TURN, U-DIE!” It’s based on a short story by King that he wrote back in 1973 where trucks come alive and start trying to murder everyone in sight. Like many King premises, it’s silly beyond belief, but the “what if?” implications make for strangely addictive storytelling. This remake was created by the USA Network and starred Timothy Busfield (The West Wing) and Brenda Bakke (Hot Shots! Part Deux).

And because this was the mid-90s, they had to work in aliens somehow. In this case, it’s implied that extraterrestrials somehow turn every big vehicle in the world against their human owners. Does any of this make any sense? No, and the more you think about it, the less you can rationalize it. Are the trucks made sentient, or is there an alien up there controlling it like a drone? How could aliens even work this in an era before highly computerized vehicles?

In any case, welcome to Lunar, a Nevada town not too far from Area 51. At a small diner in this one-stoplight town, trucks begin acting all erratically… and then graduate very quickly to vehicular homicide. Everyone gets trapped there in this desert pitstop (shades of Tremors) — including mechanic Ray (Busfield) and tour guide Hope (Bakke) — while the trucks stalk and try to kill them.

As you might expect, there’s some decent demolition derby-style stunts with big rigs, but the budget isn’t big enough to keep this going for as much as we’d like. As the townspeople try to contend with this singularly odd situation, we viewers try to contend with the wildly inconsistent rules of this movie.

How can the trucks repair themselves? How can the aliens control hazmat suits? Why are even toy trucks capable of murder? Why do sentient trucks need to communicate via honking horns? How hard would it be to avoid four semi trucks in a small parking lot? Why don’t they try to take out the trucks’ tires? Why do some of the trucks smash through other trucks? What’s the deal with Exposition TV and the subplot with the chemical fire?

Asking such questions brings you only to frustration. You may elect, however, to enjoy the ride, such as it is. And it’s an aggressively OK ride that could’ve benefitted from better acting, better stunts, and more subplots.

Like with many Stephen King movies and miniseries, Trucks has an extensive ensemble of characters — but unlike other projects, most of these people are blandly devoid of interesting qualities. I couldn’t identify any of them past the two top billing stars, and even that pair are pretty dull.

Certainly, it is interesting to have your villain be faceless machines — and ones that we see every day. There’s an eerie wrongness of seeing empty trucks continually circle around a truck stop like sharks. This is more faithful to the original King story, and it’s not exactly terrible if you’re making your way through his library of movie adaptations. But it’s a quarter-tank of a decent tale that ends up running on fumes long before it’s done.

Intermission!

• Allegedly, there was a subplot where the son falls in love with his motorcycle when it becomes alive. Now THAT I would’ve loved to see.
• Self-repairing trucks!
• The truck mirror moving to check out a van made me laugh (even though it’s supposed to be ominous)
• “First time in this part of the cosmos. I mean it no harm.”
• “There’s always a lot of psychic energy in places of great emptiness.”
• There’s a lot of grass and trees for this to be in Nevada, but what do I know (this was made in Canada)
• That is one super-chonky cell phone
• The truck drove into a transformer — did it commit suicide?
• “No, I’m scared to death,” she said in a bored monotone.
• That’s a convenient TV news channel that fades in and out of broadcast
• KILLER TONKA TRUCK!
• I want to play that beautiful pinball machine in that truck stop
• EVIL AUTONOMOUS HAZMAT SUIT! FOR SOME REASON!
• “My dad’s not a redneck. We’re from Detroit.”
• Do you think that fixing up a pickup truck is a good idea in the middle of a sentient homicidal truck outbreak? Yeah? More power to you, then.
• Trucks can growl
• Hey look at that, the truck you fixed up killed you. Couldn’t see that coming.
• Trucks are predictably axe-resistant
• “They’re talking to each other!”
• Trucks talk in Morse code in English
• Trucks are really good at killing people in drainage pipes
• “If the trucks don’t get you this afternoon, the rats will tonight!”
• “I try not to let myself process wars.”
• Zombie truck!