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The Appropriate Tune - "Get At Me Dog", by DMX
We haven’t gotten our dose of Stephen King yet this year and not many days left to get it in, so let’s do it today. Plenty of good King adaptations left I could cover, like,The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption, or shitty ones like Sleepwalkers or Lawnmower Man, but my writing energy has been running lower and lower the last couple days so let’s just do an average one instead.
In Cujo, Dee Wallace stars as Donna Trenton, a homemaker and unfaithful housewife who lives with her husband Vic (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) and son Tad (Danny Pintauro) in what is probably Maine seeing as it is a Stephen King story. Things are going fine, all the affairs and cereal-based controversies that we all face in our daily lives, but unfortunately the Trenton family has some car trouble. Also unfortunately, they went to a farm in the middle of nowhere to get it fixed. And most unfortunately of all, the mechanic’s family dog, Cujo, got bit by a couple of bats the other day and now is looking a little shaky. Someone’s looking for a bite to eat, and it’s not anybody walking on two legs.
The strength and weakness of Cujo then is in its premise itself. People do get attacked by rabid animals sometimes, so a movie about being menaced by a rabid animal seems simple enough to base a movie around. However people, at least a decent amount of them, also love dogs and so don’t like to see dogs suffer or get hurt, especially in movies where the audience watches helplessly as things play out in front of them. So the makers of Cujo are stuck between a rock and a hard place in that regard, stuck with a movie that a portion of the potential audience would avoid on principle. If it was just a dog killing people? Sure, that’s fine. A sick dog killing people? That’s a step over the line.
That being said, only the last half of Cujo is really about dealing with Cujo. Most of Cujo is actually spent on family drama, waiting for Cujo to flip the switch. Which makes sense, easy to get suspense out of a mother and kid being in danger. So maybe it’d be like being eased into it, or maybe you’d hate it even more because you’d be seeing a dog slip into feral insanity. Either way you’re getting the family drama, which kind of feels like trying to find excuses not to deal with the whole ‘rabid dog’ thing. Tad is a bit too high-pitched for my tastes, and I think both we as the audience and Donna Trenton are kind of sick of him at a certain point.
Personally? I like dogs, so seeing the blood stain where a dog used his skull to cave in a car door is a bit distasteful. By that same token, there is a panic and terror that comes in those scenes with Cujo that are accomplished quite well. So it’s in a bit of a gray area, but I’ll give it the thumbs up. Dog fans beware, but if you like moms in distress this movie definitely delivers.
STATUS: RECOMMENDED
