You can imagine the pitch meeting that spewed out this idea: what if monster trucks were actually powered by monsters? The result is a screenplay that takes every off-road narrative short-cut available and ploughs its massive, over-inflated tyres over the clear influences that came before: ET, Gremlins and The Iron Giant, to name but a few.
A power company is drilling for oil in the hills above the small town where Tripp (Lucas Till) dreams of escape. The over-empathic score rumbles ominously when a company exec (Rob Lowe) sneers on to the screen, so it’s no surprise that he orders the drills to keep working at the expense of what might be an undisturbed ecosystem under the rocks. Three giant oil-drinking tentacled creatures escape, one of them taking up residence in Tripp’s half-built truck. It takes a special kind of cluelessness for a film to make the gas-guzzling monster the hero, but it’s likely that the target audience – children under 12 – will be so befuddled by all the noise and action that they won’t notice the inconsistencies.
