"Curtis? Are you dead?"

Hey mortals, hope you had a great Friday the 13th despite your limited viewing options for Jason movies. I see a lot of you made the best of it and checked out The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. I tuned in myself, but after two hours of waiting for the signal to load, I realized I was drunk on Miskatonic Revivers and still had some damned souls to torment.

The Internet connection in Hell isn't that great to begin with because we're actually stealing bandwidth from Limbo, where every one binge watches Pawn Stars reruns until the end of time, so at first I had no idea that the problem was that Shudder was not prepared for the success of its big promo.

I caught up the next day. It was good seeing Joe Bob again. I stole everything I know about film criticism from that guy.

In fact, I'm about to tell you about a movie I watched Joe Bob host 20 years ago on Monstervision, but because I'm still salty about the technical difficulties, it's not on Shudder.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Maximum Overdrive.

Stephen King himself directed this 1986 film. He explains his reasoning in his epically coked-out trailer.

The action takes place in Wilmington, N.C. It seems a comet is passing over the earth, leaving in its wake a wave of radiation that causes all the machines to become sentient and hostile towards humanity.

First, an ATM calls King an asshole. Then a drawbridge raises while a bunch of cars are still on it and you get to see several minutes of gloriously mindless wreckage. At the Dixie Boy truck stop, the gas pumps quit working until the grease monkey looks down the tube to see what the problem is and it sprays him in the eyes. An electric knife goes crazy on a waitress. And a truck driver playing an arcade game finds new meaning to the term "game over."

Then over at the little league field a Coke machine shoots a coach in the nuts and a steamroller runs over a kid. The scene cuts before we get to see an awesome head splatter that was edited out.

Emilio Estevez plays the heroic line cook. Pat Hingle, who also played Commissioner Gordon in 1989's Batman, portrays Hendershot, the truck stop owner. Yeardley Smith, best known as the voice of Lisa Simpson, plays a none-too-bright country bride, but the real star of the movie is a tractor-trailer with a giant Green Goblin head mounted on the grill.

The Green Goblin truck appears to be the leader of all the trucks who descend on the Dixie Boy and establish a reign of terror. And what is it the trucks want? You guessed it, gas! So they enslave the people to pump the gas for them.

Luckily, there's more to the Dixie Boy than meets the eye. It turns out Hendershot is a gun runner and has a basement full of rocket launchers.

With most movies, you see one guy blow up an evil truck with a rocket launcher, it's awesome and the movie ends. A lot of directors figure if you've seen it once, you've seen it, but not King. No fewer than three trucks meet their demise via rocket-propelled grenade. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Somehow it never gets old.

This movie is deliriously goofy, but despite its flaws, it's the best movie King ever directed. I guess he figured he did it right the first time because it's also the only movie he ever directed.

Still, it's hard to hate 90 minutes of wanton destruction, and the havoc isn't completely bereft of a philosophical viewpoint. The opening titles are accompanied by AC/DC's anthemic "Who Made Who?" because, like, who did make who? Did people make the machines or did the machines make the people, man?

A lot of cocaine was involved in the making of this film.

AC/DC provided the entirety of the all-rock soundtrack, except maybe the cheesy orchestral jabs that punctuate the scary bits.

Maximum Overdrive streams on Hulu, Amazon Prime and E-pix.