15 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies Of The 1980s

There's a particular potency to outlandishly trashy movies which, at their inception, had the makings of something genuinely great and/or important. This was undoubtedly the case when Stephen King - biggest-selling horror novelist of the 1980s, whose books had been the basis for many major movies - stepped into the director's chair himself.

The result, 1986's Maximum Overdrive (based on King's short story Trucks) is not, by any standard definition, a good film. However, it is utterly hypnotic in its badness, constantly begging questions about just what the hell anyone involved thought they were doing, and indeed how they were able to get it made at all.

As a comet passes over the earth, all machines suddenly achieve sentience - and they want humanity dead. The action centres on the residents of a North Carolina town fighting for survival, with a ragtag group of survivors staging a last stand at a remote truck stop surrounded by a marauding gang of big rigs, headed up by a particularly ominous truck with an oversized Green Goblin head on the hood.

While it has some fairly respectable stars in Emilio Estevez and Pat Hingle, Maximum Overdrive is by turns so outlandish and so incompetently made, it beggars belief. But damned if it isn't tremendously entertaining, with its overtly camp humour, and soundtrack consisting entirely of AC/DC songs.

It's no accident that King has never directed again. By the author's own admission, he was a heavy cocaine user at the time, which may to an extent explain the film's bizarre tone - not to mention his performance in the equally bizarre trailer.