Overall this movie's pretty good, but my friends and I laughed out loud at the part where the threshing combine chews up the car. Besides the absurdity of the whole set-up (Mary Ann just happened to have an evil combine driver stationed in the field in case someone escaped to there? Why ram the combine when just shooting the driver would have done the job?) the car-eating looks very fake. Is it even remotely possible? How strong are those things?
sharePure Hollywood, but for sheer effect, it's a great scene. They are in Kansas, wheat country. What the Hollyweirdos did for that scene was create a kind of composite device. The combine harvester cuts the wheat with the big reel in front ("reaping"), threshes the grain, then winnows the results. The grain is blown through a pipe into a truck that drives alongside, the chaff blows out the back. This is circa 1970's. Where the bales out the back come in, that's old-timey square bailing which was done with a different agricultural product, hay. And a different machine. A bailer doesn't need a reel out front, the cut hay was already drifted into windrows for the machine to scoop up. So we see the front of a combine, the back of a bailer. Note, we never see a side view of the entire machine. Farmers watching this in the theater back in the day must've been laughing their asses off.
What would really happen: Car crashes into reel, bends reel up, machine stops, that's it. The teeth on the reel are fantasy, combine reels had flat paddles. Now, could a bailer by itself digest steel and iron car parts? Certainly not.
The fat, evil kid running (let's call it) "the Machine," he goes right along with this entire parody, perfectly cast.