Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983)

In the unofficial trilogy of animal-centered horror directed by Lewis Teague in the first half of the '80s (Alligator in '80, Cujo in '83, and Cat's Eye in '85), Alligator is always going to be my favorite (Robert Forster, Sydney Lassick, Henry Silva, Michael V. Gazzo, Robin Riker, and Sue Lyon in a giant alligator movie written by John Sayles? C'mon! There's no competition!), but Cujo is a respectable, character-driven, effective little movie in the mid-budget range that Hollywood used to distribute in droves alongside the big-budget fare they produced themselves. (Can you imagine the visually flat, thin-character, CGI nightmare this thing would be now?) 

Neither a hit nor a flop, Cujo did mediocre business in theaters but was an eventual success on VHS and in television airings and has developed a cult following in the years since. Cujo is a Stephen King adaptation that softens the book a bit but not so egregiously that the horror is dulled, and the film is well served by its practical effects and a pretty great duo of performances from Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro as the mother and son trapped in a hot Ford Pinto under siege from the rabid Cujo. 

Wallace is always a reliably natural actor who never overdoes it and always gets the tone of the movie she's in, and Pintauro as Tad delivers a surprisingly excellent child actor performance that foregoes the overly cutesy and mannered kid roles all too prevalent in the '80s and '90s. He acts like a real kid, and he delivers the goods in the trapped-in-the-car second half. (Keeping the animal theme going, a retired-from-show-biz Pintauro moved to Austin, TX, the city I live in, in 2016, and worked for four years as a vet tech for Austin Pets Alive, the shelter where my wife and I adopted our two fantastic cats, Loretta and the late, great Fern. He recently moved back to Los Angeles and resumed his acting career with a Lifetime Christmas movie.)

Most of you know the story. Cujo is a big ol' Saint Bernard who chases a rabbit into a bat cave. The dog sticks his big ol' head in the cave and gets his nose bit by a rabid bat. His distracted owner (a rural mechanic named Joe played by veteran character actor Ed Lauter) fails to notice the dog's increasing rabidity, and disaster eventually ensues as Donna (Wallace) and Tad (Pintauro) are stuck on Joe's property in their broken-down Pinto with only a rabid dog for company.

Teague does a good job making you care about all these characters (including the dog) with just a handful of quiet moments. You know Joe's wife is planning to leave him and take their son with her when you see her packing the family photo albums for what was only going to be a weeklong trip to visit her sister in Connecticut. You know Joe's an abusive dick by just a few body movements and lines of dialogue. You know something's up between Donna and family friend/handyman/carpenter Steve by the way her neck and shoulders tense up as she's cooking over the stove when he drops by the house. You know Steve's a weird dude when he picks up a trombone and blows a couple notes after he has sex. Nothing is overplayed or overdone. It's just a quiet building of character so you care about this mother and son when they get stuck in a car for half the movie.

Cujo was played by five different Saint Bernards, a mechanical dog head, and a guy in a dog suit. I'm a middle-aged grump who hates digital effects, but I think even the biggest CG nut would have to agree that the practical effects here have a real, visceral impact (other than a couple quick guy-in-a-suit shots). 

CG has come a long, long way from its abysmal late '90s version, and CG backgrounds are pretty seamless when effects people are given the proper time and budget, but something is still texturally amiss when people, animals, and creatures are digital creations sharing visual space with human actors and real physical locations. The cheapest, stupidest practical effects still look better to me than slick digital stuff because they look like they exist in the same world as everything else in the frame. Aesthetically speaking, and allowing for dozens of exceptions a year, I mostly fucking hate this century's new movies because the Hollywood movies look like they were created in an office and the indie movies sound like they were created on Twitter.

Rant over. Cujo is a bit mild on the horror front, there's an obligatory jump scare in the finale that's a little ridiculous, the California and Utah filming locations look nothing like the Maine setting, and I'm a bit confused about Vic (Daniel Hugh Kelly) working for an advertising agency in a small town in Maine that is somehow responsible for a national TV ad campaign for cereal, but those quibbles aside, this is a solid and well made film. I miss when solid and well made films were a normal part of the mainstream release schedule. Speaking of, a Cujo remake has been in the works since 2015 but has yet to make it to screen. It's called C.U.J.O. (canine unit joint operations, duh), and changes the titular character from a rabid Saint Bernard to a robot dog gone awry. No one needs this.

 

A Face in the Fog (Robert F. Hill, 1936)

An hour-long cheapie with enough story to power a 12-episode miniseries, A Face in the Fog is a modest, silly, fun little murder mystery from the short-lived but prolific independent production company Victory Pictures. Victory operated for five years in the latter half of the 1930s, even managing to keep the business together for two years after a devastating studio fire in 1937. They specialized in westerns but occasionally dipped their toe into other genres. A Face in the Fog slams together several, including horror, mystery, comedy, the police procedural, the newspaper movie, and the behind-the-scenes-of-showbiz movie. They even sprinkle a few dollops of romance near the end. It's truly head-spinning how much they cram into an hour. Needless to say, the plot holes are a mile wide but whiz by so fast you won't question them until after the credits roll.

I'm going to foolishly attempt a condensed plot description. A cloaked, hunchbacked serial killer named The Fiend is on a murder spree in Los Angeles, wasting people with a mysterious poison whose application is unknown (we soon find out it involves a gun that shoots a frozen poison pellet that dissolves upon contact with its target). Most of the killer's victims are the cast or crew of a play being rehearsed at a theater in the neighborhood. The Fiend has unsuccessfully attempted to murder newspaper columnist Jean Monroe (June Collyer) because she posted a sensationalistic column about seeing the killer's face. She admits she fabricated the column to her boyfriend and reporter at the paper Frank Gordon (Lloyd Hughes) (her defense: "I have a flair for the dramatic"), but that lie has made her a target. Jean and Frank are apparently the only writers at the paper, the other two employees being the no-nonsense editor Harrison (Sam Flint) and the all-nonsense alcoholic photographer Elmer (Al St. John).

The police are investigating the murders without any luck but have enlisted the help of the doomed theatrical production's playwright, Peter Fortune (Lawrence Gray). As the head detective believably tells us in an incredible piece of exposition, in addition to writing many successful murder mystery plays, Fortune is also a part-time private investigator who has assisted the police in solving multiple homicides. Fortune gives half of the credit to a mysterious friend named Sanchi (one name, like Cher or Madonna) who lives in a shack on the outskirts of town and gives Fortune ideas for murder methods in both his plays and unsolved cases. Everyone wants to talk to Sanchi, but he'll only talk to Fortune.

You may not think that plot description was as condensed as I promised, but at least 37 more things happen in the remaining 45 minutes. The film is a whirlwind of exposition and action that almost never catches its breath. It's hardly a marvel of cinematic technique, and the comic relief sometimes lands with a dull thud, but it's a lot of fun if you enjoy '30s time capsules. It's also a rare early example of a serial killer being the villain of a horror (or horror-adjacent) movie. Most '30s horror involves ghosts, monsters, ancient curses, deals with the devil, or killers bumping off relatives or colleagues for an inheritance or career boost or expensive stolen object, so it's fun to see a weirdo with a poison gun bumping people off for mysterious reasons.

Though the majority of the film was shot on studio sets, the handful of location-shot scenes are the most fascinating part of the whole movie for me. The driving scenes, instead of being studio-bound static shots with back projection, are actually filmed on the city streets of Los Angeles circa 1936. It's so fun seeing the old cars, traffic, pedestrians, shops, and streets of a portion of 1930s Los Angeles. I wonder if Sanchi's shack still exists. It's a great shack. (There's no way that shack still exists. That's prime real estate.)