Cujo Blu-ray Review
We all might want to rethink our criticism of the Ford Pinto's safety record.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 17, 2013
Pantheism is the belief that a divine spirit inhabits all of creation, from the lowliest amoeba to inanimate objects like
rocks to the supposed crowning glory of humanity and beyond. Though it's probably not an "official" belief system,
some might accuse Stephen King of being a pan
demonist, for the ubiquitous author has built one of the modern
publishing era's most fortuitous careers out of seeing evil in just about any and every object, living or otherwise,
imaginable. We've had haunted and/or nefarious vacation lodges, towns, diseases, cars, clowns, disaffected youths—
need we continue? Well, let's add just one more: man's best friend, the erstwhile
dog. King is an expert in
making the reader (and by extension the viewer of the many film adaptations based upon his works) fear the everyday,
those mundane little things that drift in and out of most of our lives without a second thought.
Cujo was
perhaps a more rational approach to horror than some of King's more supernaturally themed opuses, for there's a more
or less mundane cause to the rampaging titular dog's evil behavior: rabies. That is a surprisingly concrete
raison
d'être for nastiness in King's
oeuvre, as the author frequently likes to traffic in the opaque miasma of the
collective unconscious' most deep seated terrors. But if the cause is at least a little less inchoate than in a lot of King's
pieces, that doesn't mean the horrifying effect is any less pronounced.
Cujo is one of the most claustrophobic
film adaptations of any King work (quite remarkable given such confined efforts as
The Shawshank Redemption), and if it's not the
most successful King adaptation out there, it still has its share of thrills and chills, especially for dog lovers who look at
canines and automatically think that snuggling into their warm furry bodies is a natural thing to do.
As surreptitiously undermining as evil usually is in Stephen King fare, there's another encroaching nemesis that quite
frequently afflicts the author's characters, namely the much more pedestrian issue of family dysfunction. Over and over
in
King's stories and novels, we have various family members more or less at war with each other, creating a roiling
emotional atmosphere in which evil seems to thrive.
Cujo is certainly no exception to that general rule. In fact
one of the major detriments to this film adaptation is that it spends
so much time setting up the roiling
relationships between the disintegrating family unit at the core of the story that some viewers may in fact lose interest
long before the evil rabid dog makes much of an impact.
The soap operatic aspect of
Cujo fills up more or less the first half of the 90 minute or so running time of the
film. We meet attractive young wife and mother Donna (Dee Wallace-Stone), who is dealing with a lot on her emotional
plate. Her husband Vic (Daniel Hugh Kelly) is an ambitious advertising executive who is reeling from having his major
account unspool before his very eyes due to an unfounded health scare. Meanwhile their son Tad (Danny Pintauro) is
suffering from debilitating fears that there's a monster in his closet, perhaps a psychological projection of the tension he
senses between his parents. Donna has been attempting to soothe her troubled psyche in the arms of the local tennis
stud, Steve (Wallace-Stone's real life husband Christopher Stone), an affair which Vic stumbles into knowledge of one
fateful day. Meanwhile Vic has attempted to get his sporty red convertible fixed at a rural mechanic's home shop, and
promises to have Donna's faltering Pinto taken there soon.
The
mechanic's family also provides some low level turmoil as well. It's obvious the mechanic is a heavy drinker
and probably an abusive husband and father. His wife ends up winning $5,000 in the lottery and asks (begs, really) to
be allowed to go visit her sister with their son. Meanwhile, the family's dog Cujo has been exhibiting troubling behavior
since having been bitten by a bat, though only the family's son seems to be concerned about the startling
transformation of the giant Saint Bernard.
All of these plot machinations serve nothing more than to lay the
groundwork whereby Donna and Tad can arrive at the mechanic's isolated shop to be attacked by the crazed animal.
Vic has taken off due to the affair, the mechanic and his assistant have become the first two of Cujo's victims, the
mechanic's wife and son have taken off due to the lottery (and the implied abuse), and so we're left with Donna and
Tad in a broken down Pinto being repeatedly terrorized by an increasingly manic dog.
Cujo might have worked better had the terror arrived a lot sooner. As it is, there is
so much
dysfunctional turmoil to work through to get to the scary bits that the film seems weighed down in "kitchen sink drama"
to the point of absolute lethargy. A perhaps more important issue, albeit one that may work more subliminally than the
lack of up front scares, is the fact that Cujo is an innocent victim himself. A
lot of King's work has Evil (with a
capital "E") afflicting various people who really don't deserve to be afflicted (think
Carrie), but there's something
almost tragic about a sweet dog coming down with rabies and attacking various people (some of whom, like the
mechanic and his assistant, seem to warrant
some kind of attack).
All of this said, once the "attack dog" scenario finally begins unfolding, there's little question that
Cujo does
work up some considerably frightening sequences, but there's a certain air of desperation as the film continues
trundling down its seemingly interminable path. As Donna and Tad continue to try to exist within the increasingly
untenable confines of their Ford Pinto (which actually holds up admirably well under Cujo's ferocious assaults), the film
does become almost anger provoking, simply because it's all built on so many patently ridiculous conceits. There's also
a rather troubling final showdown between Donna and Cujo that may have ASPCA and PETA members up in arms,
though Teague makes it quite clear in his commentary that he purposefully staged the goings on so as not to show
anything
too graphic or in fact to endanger the dog playing Cujo.
Cujo never really fully integrates its roiling subtext of family dysfunction within the overall genre conventions of a
horror thriller, but it's laudable that the film at least
tries. What works best in this film is the relationship
between Donna and Tad. Cujo may be a "mad dog", but he's no match for a "Mama Grizzly".