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.