You could contribute to It: Chapter Two’s box-office domination tonight, or you could revisit a simpler time, a time when Stephen King was but a young man brand, whose devaluation and resurrection was still in the future. This devaluing was hastened by King’s own Ed Wood impression with 1985’s Maximum Overdrive, a movie so fucking inept that King’s cinematographer literally lost one of his eyes while making it. But Overdrive is a great lesson in how difficult it is to be a good director, especially when juxtaposed against 1983’s Christine, the story of a toxic nerd and his demon-possessed car. King put his coked-out all into Overdrive, and it led to King movies being shorthand for “shitshow” for the next decade-plus. John Carpenter didn’t even like Christine, and he took the job for no other reason than he had bills to pay and smokes to buy, and he still delivered a darkly comic cult classic that works just as well now as it did in ’83. BOBBY ROBERTS