King-O-Ween: Cujo (1983)
The continuing story of a Maine town that's gone to the dogs.
I haven’t read Cujo, and I feel like that’s okay, because apparently Stephen King doesn’t remember writing it. As detailed in his book On Writing, it was one of the stories he completed in the midst of a cocaine binge, and he has little recollection of putting it on the page.
Having seen Lewis Teague’s 1983 adaptation, I can see that. Cujo isn’t the insane, frenzied story we associate with a coke bender, but it has the sweaty desperation and scuzzy atmosphere that tip you off that whoever thought it up wasn’t in a healthy state of mind.
The story is so simple that its title has become shorthand for any tale about a crazed family pet. During a hot Maine summer, a family’s lovable St. Bernard gets bitten by a bat and becomes rabid, going on a bloody frenzy and eventually trapping a mother and her young son in a small car. It’s one of the rare King horror stories not to involve supernatural happenings, instead attempting to deliver a primal tale of survival.
Attempting is the key word. Because while King’s novel might be a classic and the film has a few stretches that work, the movie falls flat and feels stretched even at a 90 minutes.
Let’s get to the positives first. There’s a solid horror survival story that comprises the film’s third act, in which Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) tries to protect her son, Tad (Danny Pintauro), from the frantic Cujo. In these moments, Teague makes the most of the cramped environs of the Pinto, and cranks up every rattle and crash as the giant dog slams into the doors and windows. Shots of the dog’s giant bloody maw breaking through the glass, biting at the kid are terrifying, and Tad’s screams contribute to the nerve-shredding. When Cujo is focused on the dog and the car, it works.
The problem is that the sequence comes in the last 30 minutes of the film, following an opening hour of soap opera shenanigans and slow ramp-up to the horror. Donna, you see, is involved in an affair with family friend Steve (Christopher Stone) and her husband Vic (Daniel Hugh Trenton) is oblivious because he’s an ad writer about to lose a giant cereal account. While they’re dealing with this, the auto mechanic who owns Cujo is celebrating the fact that his wife won the lottery, which means she can go visit her sister and he and a buddy can go carousing, leaving a perfect excuse for why his home is empty, save for a deadly dog, when Donna and Tad bring the Pinto for repairs.
I don’t have any problem with front-loading the film with these personal stories. In most cases, it would lend depth and heighten the stakes. And perhaps it works better in King’s novel. But the characters are so unlikable and shrill that it drags the movie down. Wallace is a strong actor, but Donna has no defining characteristics other than that she feels guilty for the affair and her son prefers his father to her. I’m not sure why, because both men in Donna’s life aren’t exactly winners. Steve is the “town stud” who goes from kind to psychotic in the space of two seconds, and Vic is a passive character who spends most of the film trying to salvage a cereal account. There’s a lame attempt at melodrama in the back half, but it serves mainly to keep Vic from finding Donna and Tad long, and the film is dramatically inert whenever there isn’t a killer dog on the screen.
King has been described as having a weakness for writing female characters. I don’t think that’s entirely true, and he’s gotten much better about it in recent years. And it’s possible Donna’s character could be less problematic in the novel than in the film. But her role here is basically to just feel awful for betraying her husband, see what a bad mother she’s become and fight to redeem herself by bashing the dog’s head in. The male characters run into some of the same problems King protagonists tend to hit when they’re not plagued by addiction or other demons; Vic, in particular, is a bland non-entity, a good guy only because he’s not as bad as the others. Steve’s personality changes as the script dictates. Every other character is a caricature, scuzzy and dislikable, around to be nothing but dog food.
Which would be okay if the dog in question was, in fact, scary. And I can see how the idea of taking a St. Bernard, one of the friendliest dogs, and turning it into a vicious killer would be unsettling on the page. In practice, however, it’s hard to make the fluffy dog, with his tongue constantly lolling out of his mouth, scary. For one, his tail is wagging in way too many of the scare scenes, and the dog never has the frightening speed or sense of menace that, say, a German Shepherd, Doberman or Pitbull might. The kill scenes lack tension or menace, and the fact that Cujo mainly kills some unlikable characters before Donna and Tad show up robs it of any primal, random dread. My guess is that the close-up scenes in the Pinto involved puppetry or animatronics, which is why they’re more effective than wide shots of the dog standing around, covered in fake blood and slime. To be honest, I spent more of the film feeling sorry for the dog who had to play Cujo than I did fearing the beast.
One thing I will commend, however, is the cinematography, which conveys the sense of a sweltering summer day. Jan de Bont served as director of photography shortly before he would go on to serve in the same capacity on Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October; he would, of course, go on to a career as the director of films like Speed and Twister. De Bont gives the film a greasy, yellow look that is almost nauseous throughout, easily selling the oppressive heat and humidity that becomes a deadly threat to Donna and Tad as they’re trapped in the small car.
In the end, Cujo isn’t bad, and is worth a look for that final act, but it’s one of the more plodding and dull of the “major” King efforts. I understand those who saw it as children and were frightened by it; that last sequence is terrifying, and the dog has an imposing look. But visiting it as an adult showed that maybe this is one of those King adaptations that didn’t quite cut it.
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