‘There are no real monsters…’
One of Stephen King’s more underrated works, Cujo is a thrilling monster novel that succeeds because it brings its characters to life and makes them three dimensional and relatable. It is also one of King’s most grounded novels. There is nothing supernatural here. Not really. Lewis Teague’s film adaptation succeeds as a monster movie but fails as a character study…
When Vic Trenton (Daniel Hugh Kelly) leaves town on a business trip, his wife Donna (Dee Wallace) and young son Tad (Danny Pintauro) find themselves locked inside their stiflingly hot car by a rabid and monstrous St. Bernard. Beethoven this ain’t.
Bringing a murderous dog to life and making it convincing is a tough challenge, but Teague and his cast pull it off in spades. Cujo is genuinely terrifying thanks to a mixture of four St. Bernards, several mechanical dogs, and some inventive camera work and sound editing. The concept is a thin one for a feature length movie, but Teague keeps the action moving along until to the show stopping conclusion – and it is conceivable that this film did for dogs would Jaws did for sharks for impressionable children everywhere in the 1980s. The issue is that the nuances and subplots of King’s novel are lost here, perhaps understandably, and that renders Cujo a little one-note and repetitive.
Cujo is not the best King adaptation by a long shot, but it is a competent retelling of one of his finest works. A minor success.