It’s always painful to see Hollywood to run so dry of ideas that they shell out good pocket coupons to produce cheap/cheesy horror like Wrecker (releasing November 6, 2015): “Best friends Emily and Lesley go on a road trip to the desert. When Emily decides to get off the highway and take a ‘short cut,’ they become the target of a relentless and psychotic trucker who forces them to play a deadly game of cat and mouse.”
Not only is Wrecker NOT an original idea with a crappy title, who would pay to see a movie what you can see on a freeway any day of the week?
Wrecker’s plot is a direct lift from Stephen Spielberg’s Duel (1971), in which McCloud (or “Dennis Weaver”) is relentlessly pursued across dirty desert back roads by a 18-wheeler driven by a malevolent invisible trucker.
This was mimicked by Elliot Silverstein’s The Car in 1977, in which Amityville Horror’s James Brolin goes up against a possessed black car that “vroom-thump-thumps” anyone brave enough to use a crosswalk in Utah.
And picking up the pieces and running with that, who could forget Christine, the 1983 Stephen King horror movie that featured a “body by Chrysler, soul by Satan” ’58 Plymouth Fury that could return to showroom condition after being engulfed in flames and making griddle cakes out of thugs.
Then came Maximum Overdrive (another Stephen King adapted movie) in 1986 that not only turns a huge truck (with Spider-Man’s bestie the Green Goblin’s face on the front grill) into a “devastation wagon,” but anything mechanical that held a grudge against their human slave masters. (Can opener: “Take that, you opposable digit oppressors!”)
Let us not forget the Australian Road Train (aka, Road Kill), which came out in 2010. In that one the monster truck is a rolling grindhouse, running on the goop left over after it throws you in the back and food processes you into energy-efficient goop. (They got this idea from 2007’s really funny dark horror comedy, Blood Car.)
While we’re on the subject of all things vehicular homicidal, there’s the “destined for the junk yard” Super Hybrid (2010) that had a souped up Prius™-y type hybrid not yielding to the right of way of pedestrians.
Want more? There’s plenty out there – especially on the freeway.
Drinkin' & Drive-in 