* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: A huge one occurs midway through the movie, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBDz_xoxYbc when a toy dump truck kills a mailman]]. Not only does this have nothing to do with the plot, but it is the only scene in the entire movie to show blood. [[SpecialEffectsFailure Hilarious, unrealistic blood.]].
** A second scene has a team sent to clean up a chemical spill. The truck activates the air pump to the biohazard suits, inflating one and somehow controlling it to pick up an axe and murder both passengers.
** Another has a cherry-picker truck push its operator into some power lines. None of these even tangentially involve the main cast.
** Interestingly, these three scenes are often not shown during the broadcast TV versions. Some even speculate these scenes were specifically shot for the home video release.
* EsotericHappyEnding: Inverted. The short story ends with the narrator thinking to himself about the FridgeHorror of his situation--now that the trucks have forced humans to refuel them, they can also force humans to ''make more trucks'' and help them take over the world. But the story ends before we find out if that actually happens.
* ImprovedSecondAttempt: While having a smaller budget and being nowhere near as silly as Maximum Overdrive, the TV-movie adaptation of Trucks plays everything serious and it mostly works;
** Maximum Overdrive firmly established that a comet was responsible for the machine uprising with aliens being briefly mentioned at the end while Trucks posits several possibilities as to why the trucks have come alive (the setting's close proximity to Area 51, a hazardous fire involving forbidden materials, etc) but none of them are ever confirmed as being ''the'' reason.
** Some scenes feature genuine tension and actual stakes, such as two kids hiding in a sewer pipe which gets one end blocked off by a dump truck dumping it's load while the other end is blocked by a truck's exhaust bellowing fumes before they have to crawl around the trucks wheels to escape.
* TearJerker: The short story has a brief scene where the main character and the girl awaken in the middle of the night to hear a crippled and dying Snodgrass crying out for help. All they can do is listen to his agonized weeping and screaming until he finally goes quiet for good, several hours later.
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