Auden

I meant to post this earlier, but things got busy. This reminds me of when I first dipped my toe in the forum. A member said she felt that Mila Kunis' character in "Jupiter Ascending" was empowering, you disagreed but said because you are a guy you are probably wrong. (BTW, I don't think Kunis' character is empowering to women either.) I thought then it's unusual for a person to admit that he might be wrong, and even rarer for a man to admit that to a woman. Then I thought, this guy is swell. I also want to say how much I appreciate the members who, either through posts or through showing support by liking those posts, make this forum a welcoming place for everyone to goof around about bad movies, regardless of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.

Just finished the story. It's silly, in a boring way. And not remotely scary. Hard to imagine why Tobe Hooper would want to write the screenplay and direct the movie.

Right? I can't think of any non-King horror stories where sentient objects kill people.

Ahahaha!

Stefon King is oddly apt. Stefon's clubs are nightmarish. Oh wow! What an interesting addition to The Shining lore. Thanks for sharing! I suspect many critics of SFCs have Whedon in mind. Something about Gene Simmons screams nerdsville to me. I bet the washing machine drives people to suicides by eating up quarters, bleaching their clothes and not completing the spin cycle. *shudders* The Mangler is in the same short story collection that has Trucks--Night Shift. Oh, and it also has Children of the Corn and The Man Who Loved Flowers. I guess I'm not done with the book yet. My library has 4 copies of Night Shift in its catalogue. 3 are lost and one is library use only. I had to buy mine.

Jesus Christ, that's awful. I don't remember anything about book Wendy, I only have a vague impression that she's not like movie Wendy. It's worth noting that The Shining is a v. personal work for King. Jack Torrance struggled with alcoholism just like King did. Jack was a good man steadily destroyed by the disease. However, in the movie, right from the get go, Jack was unpleasant and unbalanced. Agreed. The problem with designating the woman who fights back as the Strong Female Character is that it puts the onus of stopping abuse on the victim. The woman who endures isn't weak, the woman who is killed isn't weak. The only weak person is the abuser. Also these SFCs usually have paper-thin characterizations and are defined by violence and figure-hugging wardrobe. It's all very fetishistic. (pic source)

Thank you! I couldn't have done it without your post. It's like you set up the volleyball for me to hit. Or, it's like you pushed a step stool next to a stall so that I could hop up on it and look down. Dude. I was JUST thinking recently about how King doesn't write characters, he writes archetypes. I've stopped reading King's books too, for the same reasons as you did. And also I find his prose workmanlike. Because of HDTGM, I bought a short story collection of King for the story Trucks (I like to read the book before I watch the movie). I've no interest in reading the rest of the collection. It's not just his directing either. His screenplay isn't good. There's a reason why authors rarely adapt their own work. In the past couple of years, King wrote the screenplay for his novella, A Good Marriage. The reviews are lukewarm. Guys, if you are looking for a new horror writer to read, might I suggest the screenwriter for Beetlejuice, Michael McDowell? (He also worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas before his death.) His Southern Gothic Horror is lyrical, wryly funny, and yes, scary. And filled with interesting characters. His books have been out-of-print for a while but recently the small publisher Valancourt has resurrected McDowell's books. I wish I were a movie mogul, then I could option McDowell's The Elementals. It has one of the best teenage heroines I've come across. Valancourt also reprinted Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings. It's a great haunted house story. The movie adaptation is quite good too.

[media=''] [/media] This 5-min sketch is more gripping than the entire Maximum Overdrive. ETA: God, this sketch is brilliant.

OMG, he actually looked in the stall. RUDE. This is how you do a restroom scene. Speaking of The Shining, King described Kubrick's Wendy as "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid." I wish Yeardley Smith was just there to scream and be stupid, but she was so much worse. I wonder if King knew how anger-making Smith's character is. Maybe it was delibrate. Maybe King was like "See? See? That's basically Wendy from The Shining. Annoying, right?!" BTW, I don't find Kubrick's Wendy a misogynistic character. Wendy's behavior is symptomatic of someone in an abusive relationship, and, at the end, symptomatic of someone being chased by an axe-wielding madman.

I know.

Maybe Emilio is a foot long but soft.

Agreed with what you said about the phrase make love. And how does a guy make love like a hero anyway? Pushing through neck and tongue ache until his lady finishes?

The documentary might be "Marwencol".

No, there was no drainage pipe. And there was no attempt to save the salesman dying in a ditch. Not counting attempted escapes and filling gas for the automobiles, the only time people left the diner part of the truck stop was to run to the restrooms outside to get clean water from the toilet tanks.

I gathered from watching sci-fi shows that English is basically the intergalatic lingua franca, and almost all aliens know English. This reminds me of people whose only interest in foreign languages is how to cuss in them. We can only see half of the boy's morse code translation in the movie. The full translation, from the book, is," Someone must pump fuel. Someone will not be harmed. All fuel must be pumped. This shall be done now. Now someone will pump fuel." So that's grammatical English, but stiff and awkwardly phrased. This makes more sense in Trucks. Spoilers ahead for the short story. So you know how people would say, metaphorically, that we are slaves to technology, slaves to machines. In the story, humans are literally slaves to machines. The trucks would trap humans at a location. If vehicles ran out of gas and stopped, new vehicles would drive up. If people tried to escape, vehicles would mow them down. The automobiles would tell the humans to help them. If the humans didn't comply, either because they didn't want to or because they didn't understand morse code in the first place, they would be killed. A Reo truck (all the vehicles in the story are American-made) honked out the morse code at the truck stop. The people at the truck stop voted not to refuel the trucks, thinking that they could wait for the automobiles to run out of gas, then a bulldozer tore into the truck stop killing 2 people. The narrator then went out to fill the tanks of vehicles. Cars and trucks kept coming nonstop. Like Cam Bert pointed out, not many people know morse code. The sun, the fumes, and blisters from pumping gas almost got to the narrator when the black guy, the one most adamant about not wanting to be a slave, came out and took over and pump gas for 5 hours straight while the others rested. The last 3 people left at the truck stop would be taking shifts to pump gas. In the future the machines wouldn't need humans. More and more machines were becoming sentient, they would make plants to make more machines and take over the world. So, you know, the typical humans will become obsolete sentiment.

It's "What's wrong there, sweet thing." The line is also in the script. Whatever one can say about King's script-- that it's illogical, messy, filled with broad characters--one can't say that it's ungrammatical. Even though King was under the influence, his grasp of grammar did not leave him. He wouldn't have written "noun modifer + adjective + noun."

Ha! I'm way too simple-minded to have philosophical thoughts. Aww, cute. I found the origin of the gif. Turns out, it's not a robot teddy bear photoshopped onto a dog. It's a Shih Tzu dressed in a teddy bear costume. The article left out mention of Munchkin the Shih Tzu's victims.

Just noticed that I'd typed why instead of what. I meant to ask what the little fella is.

Ewoks. I hope the people that that thing was setting out to kill survived! Why is it anyway?

Paul: So everything went back to normal after 6 days? No. In the book, things don't go back to normal. If anything, things seem to get worse. The sentence "The survivors of the Dixie Boy are still survivors," is structurally similar to a phrase in the famous passage that opens and closes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, "and whatever walked there, walked alone." Like everyone, Stephen King thought the passage was brilliant. He even quoted "and whatever walked there, walked alone," in Salem's Lot. The phrase suggests that Hill House is still haunted. By alluding to The Hauting of Hill House, King is saying that whatever happened in the world of Maximum Overdrive is still happening (hence the survivors still need to survive). I'm guessing that the Russian weather satellite line was put in because the studio did not want a bummer ending and the line cast enough ambiguity on "The survivors of the Dixie Boy are still survivors" for people to be able to say that machines stopped killing people and pets. That's interesting that Japan still has video stores. You're HDGTM's Japan correspondent.

Thanks for letting me know! I've updated my post. I learned a new word today!

Here are a few more things from the short story Trucks that the audience member didn't manage to touch on. Trucks is 18 pages, not 3, but still, a very slight, and not all that interesting, story to extrapolate into a whole movie. - There are 5 people in the truck stop. 2 are truck fodder with no discernible personalities and the rest are not annoying. - There is a couple among the 5. They are young, maybe teenagers, with the girl being younger than the boy. Other than noting that the boy and the girl are a couple, there's no sex and romance in the story. - King did not specify what items the salesman sells. There's no mention at all of religion. - King also did not specify where the story is set. - The atrocity appropriated for the short story is slavery. King cringingly had a black character say, "You want to be their slaves? That's what it'll come to. You want to spend the rest of your life changin' oil filters every time one of those ... things blats [sic] its horn? Not me." - The lines "We made them!" and "They can't" were in the story. The rest of Wanda June's rants is not. Wanda June is not in Trucks. - The only things that go haywire in the story are automobiles. No electric knives, no lawn mowers, no vending machines. The electricity does go out, but it doesn't get turned back on. - Theories on why automobiles have gone on a murderous rampage offered by the characters are electrical storms and nuclear testing. The narrator guessed that "Maybe they're mad." - No answer is provided. However, there is a clear theme in the story, which is anxieties about industrialization, about the effects of industrialization on humans and on our environment. ETA: Thanks to Hiny Rugburn for pointing out to me that blats is a real word.

You need to quit your job, Cam. You're a rich old white guy, you don't have to work. Me too! When I listened to the eppy I was all heart eyes about June.

When quoting other people's works it's customary to use quotation marks to show that the words enclosed within the quotation marks belong to another writer, and to give credit to that writer by providing a source. Otherwise, it's passing off another person's writing as one's own, AKA plagiarism. On a message board we don't have to do full on MLA/APA/Chicago/etc. citations, a link will do. Nope. One of the things that drew me to this board is that unlike so many many boards out there it's relatively free of sexism, classism, racism etc. Would be nice to keep it this way.

- I've heard the phrase mother's helper used as a synonym for alcohol and valium, but a razor blade? "The children are being difficult today. Time to bring out mother's helper and give them a few slashes on the arm!" - Are we meant to be disturbed or frightened by the bank sign and ATM flashing cusses? Because that makes me think of disgruntled employees messing around and not anything supernatural/extraterrestrial. - There was a scene where a truck nudged Emilio to an oil tank, I thought that was cute. - We don't even really need weapons to stop killer automobiles. The police could just roll out the spike strips. - My love for Andy Daly increased when he pointed out the offensive portrayal of a black character.