Very Cool!!!

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Based on the novel by Stephen King, "Cujo" is about a rabid Saint Bernard who terrorizes a mother (played by Dee Wallace) and her young son (played by Danny Pintauro). Trapped in a small, Ford Pinto that doesn't start, Wallace and Pintauro spend several agonizing days in the heat inside their car, unable to escape with Cujo just waiting for them nearby. No cell phones, no neighbors…if Wallace doesn't make a desperate attempt to flee or kill Cujo, she and her son will surely die in the car from heat exhaustion and dehydration. My most memorable, movie moment of "Cujo" is the scene when Wallace has her car door open and trying to take care of Pintauro, and Cujo appears behind her and goes in for the kill. Although "Cujo" feels at times like a made for TV movie (most of the director's work is in TV), it is still a good horror/suspense movie that continues to be relevant today with all the reported dog attacks against humans.Mannysmemorablemoviemoments

I have a love-hate relationship with Stephen King adaptations. I love The Shining, Misery, and most of IT, but can't get behind The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile. I want to love the adaptations based on his books, but as masterful as the beginnings are, the endings mostly seem to fall flat; a phenomenon not unlike Stephen King's books. The 1983 film Cujo by Lewis Teague was no different than my viewings of other King adaptations, in the way that it starts off strong, then falls off in the middle and the end. Starring Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro Cujo tells the story about a rabid dog who turns on those around him and brings evil to the small town he lives in. In the sleepy town of Castle Rock, Maine, Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) lives a modest unfulfilling life with her son, Tad Trenton (Danny Pintauro) and busy husband Vic Trenton (Daniel Hugh Kelly). Spending her days taking care of her son and dealing with her husband's absence Donna seems to feel as though her very existence has been hijacked by the other members of her family. Feeling as though she solely exists for others, Donna begins an affair with her husband's friend Steve Kemp (Christopher Stone). When Vic finds out about the affair, he abruptly leaves the house; busy dealing with a business emergency anyway, Donna is suddenly alone with her son. Because he had to hurry away to deal with the business emergency, Vic left his family's car needing repairs. On the way to have the repairs done, the car breaks down leaving Donna and her son Tad face to face with a rapid dog intent to kill. I never know what to expect with Stephen King films. Some are great and some are terrible. Cujo is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. There are some good things that happen in this film. The score is brilliant, and the dog is well-done for the screen. All the bad outweighs the few good things, however. Pacing is just horrible; I typically find great enjoyment out of a film that takes place in confinement, as this film does in the car. Cujo is not a film that works well in confinement. Bad child actors can ruin a good movie, and that is certainly the case with Cujo. The more horror movies I watch, the more disappointed I am. I love the genre, but it just seems that what passes as a horror movie is always disappointing. I won't quit the quest, but Cujo certainly did not satisfy my craving for horror movies.

1983 was a bit of a bumper year for cinematic versions of Stephen King novels. In that year alone we had Christine and The Dead Zone as well as Cujo. It would probably not be unfair to say that Cujo is the least good of the three but in all honesty there isn't a great deal in it, with all being pretty effective and nicely varied horror films. Out of those three, and unlike most King horror films in general, Cujo is not a supernatural horror movie and is based on a plausible idea. A woman and her young son become trapped in their broken down car in a remote junkyard when a St. Bernard dog, made rabid by a bite from an infected bat, lays siege to their vehicle in a murderous mood.This one could be described as a high concept movie given the very basic nature of its set-up. In order to pad things out to feature length and to add some depth, we have quite a bit of character development in the first half of the movie, which focuses mainly on a dysfunctional family and the dramas that surround them. Once the action moves to the junkyard though, most of this is largely forgotten and the film essentially becomes an 'animal-attack' horror-thriller. Dee Wallace does some good work as the mother who has to deal with the trauma while having to comfort her young son, who it has to be said is involved in some pretty intense looking scenes which may have been quite full on for the young actor involved. But the scary scenes were often achieved by very clever editing, after all a St. Bernard is hardly the most threatening of beasts to base a horror movie on. The fast and clever edits do make this creature seem genuinely menacing. Less successful though was the soundtrack which compromised of a considerable amount of really terrible music which would have been better suited to a daytime TV melodrama than a suspenseful and thrilling feature film. But on the whole, this is a pretty decent and lean effort that gets the job done quite effectively.

Cujo is just a great horror film, plain and simple, it just is. Now I haven't seen all of Stephen King's work, although I have seen his classics like misery and the Shining. I actually thought that cujo was better than the shining, but not quite as good as something like misery. The story is just very well told through film, I cannot recommend the book because I have not read it, but I can recommend this movie for horror or thriller lovers. Also the acting is done really well especially by Dee Wallace! Dee really pulled off a great performance here. And she delivers one of the best lines I've ever heard in a film: f**k you dog! Cujo definitely knows what will scare and it uses that. Also I think the run time and the pacing of the movie is spot on. I believe it's about an hour and 32 minutes, which is just right for this movie because really it doesn't need to be long if this movie specifically was overly long, then you would bore and lose the audience. And I think they did a good job at making the dog look borderline demonic and just downright evil. So all in all I think this was a great book to film Stephen King adaptation that I recommend to horror and thriller movie fans. 8/10 for Cujo!