| Based on a Stephen King novel, Cujo is not as menacing or as frightening as other film adaptations of King's popular stories and especially cannot compare to the 1976 Carrie. Cujo is a happy St. Bernard until he is bitten on the nose by a rabid bat and slowly begins manifesting the symptoms of his fatal illness. His condition deteriorates as he attacks people again and again, until finally, mom Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro) are trapped inside the family car with Cujo lurking nearby, set to kill them any way he can. A showdown is inevitable but is as predictable as the rest of the film.
This widely reviled adaptation of Stephen King's best-selling novel about a viciously rabid dog actually looks better with age. True, story lines move in and out of the first half of the film, inconsistencies abound, and the viewer may be just about to give up hope when Donna (Dee Wallace) and her young son, Tad (Danny Pintauro), pull into a junkyard in a broken-down car. From that point on, the film becomes a sort of landlocked Jaws, as mother and son are trapped in the stalled machine by the bloody, slobbering hellhound waiting just outside. The final 40 minutes are surprisingly scary, as director Lewis Teague builds the tension to a fever-pitch with a combination of stunning attack sequences and effective hysterical-mother moments inside the car. Wallace is outstanding in one of her better performances, but cinematographer Jan De Bont (who later directed The Haunting and Twister) is the real star of the show and rarely
falters. Neil Travis' editing deserves special praise for enhancing the horror of the dog attacks, but the music (by Charles Bernstein) is awful. Still, if one can patiently withstand the dumb first half, there are plenty of thrills, chills, and a great jump-scene later in the film.
Stephen King's novel "Cujo" was published first as a limited edition hardcover in 1981 by Mysterious Press.
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Stephen King Movie Index
