Trucks is one of the stragglers in the ten adaptations that come from the Night Shift stories. For reasons that should become abundantly clear as this blog post unfolds, it isn't one that gets shown on TV much anymore. It also is another victim of the "let's try it again" phenomenon of the 1990's and beyond that needlessly dulled movies in the interest of attempting to stay faithful to the original written story (e.g. The Shining, Carrie).
Now I can understand the motivation to update some of the oldest Stephen King movies, be it to modernize them or fix the perceived flaws of the original. However, I'm scratching my head a little over the decision to re-do Maximum Overdrive. It seems like perhaps they wanted to "get back" to the original concept, seeing that they even returned the name of the original short story. Surprise, surprise, though, this version defied the trends of the day and actually wandered further away from the original. In fact, I dare say this was a remake of Maximum Overdrive that gave no consideration to the original story, like they hadn't even read it.
The short story "Trucks" never revealed exactly where the truck stop was situated, while Maximum Overdrive put it in North Carolina (home of most of the Dino-era movies), and this one moved the action out west into some kind of Roswell/Area 51 hybrid area. Conveniently, this accommodates the natural beauty of the Canadian prairie where the movie was shot.
The agony or beauty (you choose) of "Trucks" was that you never know how or why the trucks became sentient and the readers are left with the bleak feeling of a world where humans must now serve their new truck overlords. This would understandably make a terrible movie (or an Oscar winner, depending on the director), so Maximum Overdrive went through the trouble of explaining how the whole situation arose. Since it was a (spoiler alert!) comet, the intrepid band of humans pretty much just had to wait it out and things got back to normal, a fact relegated to a paragraph stapled on to the end of the movie. Clearly, Chris Thomson, director of Trucks and other mid-grade TV projects, felt this was half-measure and laid out possible causes like military projects gone wild and toxic spills, which the humans could fight against and fix.
An interesting difference in Trucks is what is affected by the "sentient truck" bug. Maximum Overdrive used an expansive approach that impacted all kinds of equipment, like electric knives and ATM's, and even sprinklers that have no motor I've ever seen, while regular cars were surprisingly immune. Trucks sticks pretty much to just actual trucks, but doesn't bother to distinguish among trucks. This scene, for which I cannot improve with commentary, says it all:
Other than being kind of boring, the main problem with Trucks, and with most pre-2000 television movies, is the obvious cut corners. Leading man Timothy Busfield probably didn't wreck the budget. But most telling is that a situation where a group of humans are trapped by trucks at a truck stop requires more than three trucks. I never got the feeling they were really trapped. Instead it just felt like the whole crew suffered from bad timing, always venturing out of safety right when a truck happened to be cruising by. Ultimately it is stuff like this that made Trucks not so much a blown opportunity as an unnecessary production. Why mess with "perfection"?
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