#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER FOUR 💀
💀 ONE STEPHEN KING FILM THAT ISN'T THE FIRST ADAPTATION 💀

"Trucks" (1997)
* dir: Chris Thomson
* Action / Science Fiction / Did You Know That If You Put Gasoline In The Freezer, It Becomes Gelatinous?
[ ★★ / ★★★★★ ]

Well...after three excellent films in a row, it was only inevitable that I'd hit a wall eventually, right?

I have the vaguest memory of watching this thing on TV when I was a Stephen King obsessed child (as it WAS a made-for-TV movie on the USA Network) and thinking it was absolute dogshit even back then. And not even like "Maximum Overdrive", which is also dogshit but more like the finest dogshit you can find. "Maximum Overdrive" is, like, gourmet dogshit.

"Trucks" is...uhm. Well, at least it's needlessly gory in increasingly silly ways?

But oh, who am I kidding here.

It's bad, it's quite boring, the score sounds like someone poorly playing "The Phantom Of The Opera" on a cheap casio, and it looks cheap as shit...but all in that sort of inoffensive, late-90s DTV nonsense way that now feels sort of cozy? Or at least "mildly pleasant" if you go in with a certain mindset and/or the right basement-level expectations. And, it must be said: the age-old template of "a bunch of people trapped in one location besieged by an outside force" remains compelling to me, even in this derivative, subpar form.

There's also a truly wild sequence where one of the trucks somehow inflates an empty hazmat suit (?) and proceeds to somehow use the faceless, disembodied figure to brutally axe a couple of chemical workers to death (!). And, if I'm being honest, that bonkers scene was almost worth sitting through the rest of the 90+ minute runtime alone. You ain't gonna see THAT in "Top Gun: Maverick"!