Cujo (1983)
Directed by Lewis Teague
Written by Don Carlos Dunaway, Barbara Turner
Starring Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter
Release Date August 12th, 1983
Published June 19th, 2018
In thinking of a classic monster movie to write about this weekend in correlation with Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom I wanted a non-traditional choice. Lots of critics and movie fans will be writing about classic monsters this weekend, it’s a good theme to coincide with a big budget monster movie. I was leaning towards Jaws but then I remembered The Meg is coming out this summer and that seemed like an apt moment to write about Jaws. So, I settled upon the unique choice of Cujo.
Now, you can argue that Cujo isn’t a monster movie. A dog getting rabies is a terribly sad story with many dramatic implications. But, as written about by Stephen King and directed by Lewis Teague, Cujo has much the same tension and arc as a great movie monster. In Fact, having seen Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, I can tell you that Cujo is, for me, as frightening as Fallen Kingdom’s newest villain, the Indo-Raptor.
Cujo begins with a little boy frightened of monsters in his closet. Danny Pintauro, who would go on to child stardom on the 80’s series Who’s the Boss, plays Tad, a normal kid who will be terribly traumatized by the end of this story. Tad’s parents, Dee Wallace and Daniel Hugh Kelly, have hit a rough patch in their marriage. As we join the story, Dee is having an affair with a neighbor and Daniel is soon to find out about it.
In the meantime, Daniel needs his car fixed and turns to an amateur mechanic who lives just outside of their idyllic small town. Mr. Kember (Ed Lauter) is a jerk but he works on cars cheap. He has a dog named Cujo who we’ve already met. The opening of the film sets the tension early on as we watch Cujo get infected with rabies. Cujo chases a rabbit into a hole and while he is barking at the rabbit, he awakens bats also hiding in the hole and is bitten.
From there, the tension comes from when Cujo will turn into a frothing and feral monster that is ready to build a body count. Director Lewis Teague is very patient in how he deploys Cujo. We see the dog early in a scene where he’s introduced to Tad and his family and before he’s gone fully rabid. The scene is tense and Teague lays in the suspense with a shot of the bloody bite on Cujo’s nose. It’s 45 minutes, nearly half way through the movie before Cujo goes full Cujo.
Director Teague cleverly uses the dogs eye point of view to create tension in scenes. When Dee and Tad arrive at the Camber farm to get Dee’s car fixed, we know only Cujo is home at this point but Dee doesn’t. When the scene shifts to Cujo’s point of view from the barn he’s resting in, waiting for victims, the tension builds quickly and when Cujo bursts forth it’s nearly impossible not to gasp as Dee scrambles back into her shambling Pinto.
From there it is a series of tense scenes, a little bit of overacting from all involved, and some smartly played suspense over how Dee and Tad are going to survive this bizarre situation. I can’t speak to how much of the movie version of Cujo hues to what Stephen King wrote in his book but I can imagine that he mined the tension of this stand-off in a similar fashion. This is a classically Stephen King sort of set-up with average people in not so average peril.
Cujo isn’t an all time great film. Early on, the family drama is rather weak sauce. I understand the necessity of setting up the family dynamic and tension as it will be paid off at the end but the family stuff is clumsy and the film could have done a better job of tying this portion thematically to what Cujo is doing. The stuff about Daniel’s job as an ad executive is almost egregiously uninteresting.
That said, the tension surrounding Cujo the character is top notch, legitimately terrifying. I don’t know what an actual rabid dog is like but the rabid Cujo is a spectacularly gory horror show. Dripping with blood and other doggie bodily fluid and covered in dirt and guts, Cujo is dog body horror at its most horrific. Whoever dressed this dog did a magnificent job of making him legitimately terrifying.
I don’t want to think about what it may have taken to get Cujo to bark as he does but I hope that trickery and movie magic made him look so scary. The alternative is that the dog was made to do horrible things and that would make me hate this movie. For now anyway, I certainly don’t hate Cujo. The film is a remarkably good bit of B-Movie terror. The dog is scary, the way the dog is filmed is suspenseful and amps up the jump scares. It’s far from perfect, but for a drive in monster movie, Cujo is top-notch.
