6. KING IS MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE’SHARSHEST CRITIC.
King landed up to become the harshest critic of his film. While doing a press in 1983, he told the Gainesville Sun that the movie was “a moron movie, like Splash! You check your brains at the box office and you come out 96 minutes later and pick them up again. People say, ‘How’d you like the movie,’ and you can’t say much. It’s not like The Big Chill or 2001.”
7. DRUG ADDICTION PLAYED A ROLE IN THE FILM’S EXECUTION.
In the mid-1980s, King was struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. He even used cocaine and Xanax that eventually impacted his work. He said, “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I didn’t know what I was doing,” King said.
8. THE HOMICIDAL MACHINES INJURED THE CINEMATOGRAPHER
On July 31, 1985, a radio-controlled lawnmower that was used in the film malfunctioned and struck a plank of wood that supported the camera. The wedge splintered and injured Nannuzzi and he lost his right eye.
“That splint of wood—my god, the odds were a gazillion and one—that splint of wood then went into Armando’s eye,” said Martha De Laurentiis, Dino’s wife. “For a cameraman to lose his eye … my god.”
Nannuzzi then sued King and 17 others for $18 million and said that they were “wanton and reckless.”
