Plot
As the Earth passes through the tail of a rogue-comet; Rhea-M, previously inanimate objects (ranging from vehicles to lawnmowers to an electric knife) start to show a murderous life of their own. In a pre-title scene, a man (cameoed by Stephen King, the film's writer and director) tries to withdraw money from an ATM, but it instead calls him an "asshole". Chaos soon begins as machines of all kinds come to life and begin assaulting humans; a drawbridge inexplicably raises during heavy traffic, resulting in multiple accidents (most notably the black AC/DC van and a watermelon truck), while a vending machine kills the coach at a Little League game by firing canned soda point-blank into his groin and then to his skull, and a pilotless steamroller flattens one of the fleeing children.
The carnage spreads as humans and even pets are brutally killed by lawnmowers, chainsaws, electric hair dryers, pocket radios, and RC cars. At a roadside truck stop just outside Wilmington, North Carolina, a waitress is injured by an electric knife and arcade machines in the back room electrocutes another victim. Employee and ex-convict Bill Robinson (Emilio Estevez) realizes something is wrong when suddenly marauding big rig trucks, led by a black semi-truck sporting a giant Green Goblin mask on its grille, run down two individuals and trap the rest of the civilians inside the truck stop's diner.
Robinson rallies the survivors; they use a cache of firearms and M72 LAW rockets stored in a bunker hidden under the diner and destroy many of the trucks. The trucks fight back, and at one point several human fatalities result from an M274 "Mule" firing its mounted M60 machine gun into the diner. The military mule then demands, via sending Morse Code signals through its horn, that the humans pump diesel for the trucks in exchange for keeping them safe; the survivors soon realize they have become enslaved by their own machines. Robinson suggests they escape to a local island just off the coast, on which no vehicles or machines are permitted.
During a fueling operation, Robinson sneaks a grenade onto the Mule truck, destroying it, then leads the party out of the diner via sewer hatch to the main road. The survivors are pursued to docks by the Green Goblin truck, which manages to kill one more trucker before Robinson destroys the truck once and for all with a direct hit from a rocket shot. The survivors then sail off to safety; a title card epilogue explains that the machines are stopped with the destruction of a UFO by a Soviet "weather satellite" equipped with nuclear missiles and a laser cannon.
Read more about this topic: Maximum Overdrive
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—John Dryden (1631–1700)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)