| Cujo Released: 1983 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Predatory Animal Nuts and Bolts: This is the fun heart-warming tale about the love shared between a boy and his dog. Yeah. Right before the animal becomes a RABIES INFESTED, SLAVERING, BLOODTHIRSTY, CARNIVEROUS CANININE FROM HELL! Summary: We begin with our title character, Cujo. Cujo is a big ass Saint Bernard. We see him happy and joyous as he frolics around the grassy fields of Castle Rock Maine. He finds a rabbit that looks mighty tasty and chases him all over God’s creation. The rabbit, being the smarmy bastard that he is, decides to retreat into an underground warren. Cujo only manages to get his big head through the hole, and he begins barking incessantly at the rabbit. Wascally fellow. Little does the dumb pooch realize however, is that the warren is filled with a bunch of vampire bats. One of the bats gets sick and tired of the mutt’s howling and decides to chomp him good and proper on the nose. Cujo backs away and retreats back to his owners’ place. Now we move on to the Trenton family. Victor Trenton (Daniel Hugh Kelley) is a well to do ad-exec for a fairly prestigious firm. He must be pretty good at his job, because he’s got beaucoup bank and a really nice house to boot. Then there’s his wife Donna (Dee Wallace). Donna is a nice enough sort of lady, but she seems to have this problem misplacing her vagina. Which is to say, she finds it in the most inappropriate places. Then lastly, there is Tad (Danny Pintauro). Tad is about five-years-old. He seems to believe that monsters live inside of his closet and he is scared to go to sleep at night. But Vic is really good with his son and he even recites the ‘Monster Words’ that seems to exorcise all the nasty boogedies out of Tad’s room. The following day, the Trentons all settle down for breakfast. At this point, we meet Steve Kemp (Christopher Stone). Steve plays that friendly neighbor type who always walks into your house through the back door without asking. (Although in this case, I guess it’s appropriate that he’s the back door man. You’ll see why later if you haven’t figured it out already.) Aww hell, why wait? I’ll tell ya now. Donna is riding this clown like an electric bull. Vic doesn’t suspect anything yet, but there are clear signs that their marriage isn’t doing all that great. A few days later, Vic decides that he wants to have some work done on his jag. The only place in town that will do in the preferred time allotment is ole Joe Camber’s place. Joe lives on Maple Sugar Road, which is a bit of a drive from the upper class Trenton home. Vic drops the car off and this is where we meet the Cambers. Joe is your typical New England grease monkey type. When not working on cars, he enjoys pig fucking, cow tipping and wife beating. Then there’s his wife Charity. Charity just won $5000 bucks from the lottery, and has bought her husband a new hoist for his garage! Awww, isn’t dat cute? Lastly there’s Brett. Brett’s actually a pretty normal kid. Oh. Did I forget to mention that they also own a Saint Bernard named Cujo? Charity wants to take Brett away for the weekend to visit her sister in Connecticut. (Yeah right. She’s probably going to go sell the kid to a sweatshop and then take the money to go out whoring.) And speaking of whoring, that’s JUST what Joe plans to do as soon as his wife leaves town! Nice guy, eh? As the Cambers move along their way, they make lots of loud noises. Cujo seems to be greatly bothered by loud noises these days. He doesn’t look right. Now while the Clampetts are rousing it up in Mayberry, Donna is over shagging Steve. She decides however that she now longer wishes to continue the infidelity and breaks off the whole arrangement. Steve ain’t none too happy about that. He later follows Donna back to her house to talk some sense into her. He just can’t seem to figure out why she doesn’t want his dick. The two argue in the kitchen a bit and Donna knocks over a glass of milk. (I’m doing my able bodied best to refrain from making a ‘crying over spilled milk’ joke.) In walks Vic. Now don’t let the fact that this guy played second fiddle in Hardcastle and McCormick fool you. Vic ain’t no dummy. He pretty much suspects what is happening. Having gotten his jag back from Elmer Fudd, he prepares to go on a ten-day business trip. He asks Donna point blank whether or not she’s licking the balls. Donna says yes. Vic leaves town. That night, Joe Camber decides to go over to his buddy Gary Pervier’s place. Gary is one of the good ole boys and they talk at length about rassling, gambling and whoring and other such finely cultivated endeavors. Cujo’s looking worse then ever. Later that evening, the dog finally loses its ever-loving mind and attacks Gary. Gary tries to fight him off, but the pooch muscles his way into his house and begins to politely rip his jugular vein out from under the tender fibers of his neck. Gary does the ‘dead man’s twitch’ before expiring like day-old milk. Joe comes along and finds Gary’s body. Realizing that this will likely spoil poker night, he turns to leave. (I swear that this guy must have served as the template for Homer Simpson.) Cujo rears his ugly head and tears into Joe like Bill Clinton at a buy one/get one sale at McDonalds. So much for Joe. Let’s get back to the Trentons. Now while Vic Trenton owns a high performance candy apple red jaguar, his wife Donna drives a chunk of shit canary yellow pinto. The thing has a bad alternator and she decides to take it to Camber’s shit-shack to have it fixed. She pulls into the guy’s front yard, and the thing conks out for good. Along comes Cujo. He attacks the car scraping his bloody paw prints all over the window. Donna and Tad naturally freak out and begin going into fits of hysteria. He first attacks the passenger side window where Tad is sitting and then he goes after the driver side. Failing that, he jumps onto the hood and begins pawing at the windshield. Realizing that he can’t seem to get to the tootsie roll center of this particular tootsie roll pop, he pads away to sleep it off. Donna and Tad try to get the car started, but it’s a no-go. So they wait. They figure that eventually, Joe or Charity will return home and call their dog off. Little do they know that Charity is 1000 miles away and Joe is a bucket of kibble. She finally gets the engine to kick over and begins to pull out of the driveway. She pauses long enough to look over at Cujo and remark, “Fuck you dog.” She shouldn’ta oughtnt’a said that. The car craps out again. Cujo freaks out and attacks the car again. From way back yonder inside the Camber house, the phone starts ringing. This is likely Charity calling to check on Joe, but we never find out for sure. Cujo is quite sensitive to loud noises by this point and the sound of the telephone ringing drives him into a frenzy. (It would have driven ME nuts as well. The damn thing rang like fifty-seven times!) Again, the pooch gives up and trots off to take a nap. After sitting in the car for a few more hours, Donna decides to try her luck and go towards the house. She quietly gets out of the vehicle, but Cujo is on her like flies on shit. He tackles her sending her backpedaling into the car again. He bites down hard on her left thigh and Donna is forced to beat him off with a thermos. Meanwhile Tad is in the backseat wailing his fool head off. Meanwhile in Boston, Vic has been trying to call home all day. Obviously no one has been answering because his wife is out doing it doggie-style. But Vic is the suspicious sort and thinks that she may be doing it doggie-style with something OTHER than a dog. Frustrated, he decides to return home to Castle Rock. Night turns into day and Donna and Tad are still stuck in their car. No one has come by to see them. She had planned on waiting for the mailman to show up so that they could hitch a ride with him, but we find out that mail service has been suspended while Charity and Brett are out of town. (Which makes no degree of sense, but I’ll get into that later.) It’s wickedly hot out and the two haven’t eaten in over a day. Tad starts hyperventilating. This kid looks half dead. Meanwhile, Steve the back-door man saunters over to the Trenton house for a fun-filled lunch hour of frenetic carpet crunching. Naturally, no one is at home. For some reason that only God can seem to fathom, Steve loses his mind and trashes the house. He rips up all the pillows and bed sheets with a knife. He also slices up a photograph he finds of Donna. (???) Vic returns home hours later and calls the cops. Steve is eventually picked up and confesses to vandalizing their house. Vic tells the sheriff that Donna was supposed to take the pinto to Joe Camber’s place for repairs. The sheriff sends a deputy over to check it out. The deputy arrives while Donna and Tad are asleep in the car. Although he sees the car that was described to him by Vic Trenton, he doesn’t go over to check it out. Instead, he inspects the garage. Cujo comes after him and the cop tries to scurry away. But the pooch is meaner than big bad Leroy Brown and he sinks his teeth into the guy’s stomach. Some time passes, and Donna awakens to the sounds of Tad hyper-ventilating again. She realizes that she can’t keep fucking around waiting for someone to rescue her, so she decides to take the initiative. She gets out of the car and limps over to a patch of grass where Brett’s baseball bat had been lying. Cujo comes out and leaps after her, but Donna takes to him like Mark Maguire during playoffs. She whoops the shit out of the mutt five or six times until the baseball bat snaps in half in her hand. Cujo leaps upon her and impales himself on the sharpened broken end of the bat. (Fitting, I think. It was a bat that first made him crazy, and now it’s a bat that finally takes him down.) Donna collects Tad and brings him into the house where she begins padding him down with water. The kid eventually comes to and everything is bright and cheery. But just like any good horror movie icon, Cujo just HAS to get the last word in. In a highly effective slow motion sequence reminiscent of the climax to Friday the 13th Part 2, Cujo tears through the front door and attacks Donna and Tad. At some point, Donna picked up the dead officer’s service revolver and she uses it to shoot Cujo in the head. Yup. He’s really dead this time. Vic finally arrives just as Donna and Tad stumble out of the house. Acting/Dialogue: All the acting is really well done in this. The Saint Bernard is obviously in step with his character from the very first moment and his method acting really went along way towards galvanizing the character’s motivation and convincing me that this was in fact a real dog. All right, let me quit being a smart ass. Dee Wallace Stone plays the role of Donna Trenton and proves once and for all why she’s one of my favorite horror movie scream queens. Her character evolves through a range of different emotions and she dominates every scene that she is in. No wonder Cujo was so pissed at her. He didn’t like being upstaged. I also got to give a lot of credit to Danny Pintauro. Those of you who grew up in the 80s may remember him as Jonathan Bower in the old Who’s the Boss television show. Danny was only seven years old when he played the part of Tad and I have to say, he does a hell of a job. As I watch this film, I really don’t think this kid was actually acting. I do believe that he was scared out of his ass when the big dirty mutt slobbered up on the hood of the car. Daniel Hugh Kelley and Christopher Stone both do commendable jobs in their roles of Vic and Steve. Gore: The gore is not overly excessive, but it contains the prerequisite amount of blood that one would expect from a mad-dog sort of flick. It’s mostly just bloody bite marks and such. Guilty Pleasures: In one scene, we see a slight sliver of Dee Wallace’s lower ass cheek. That’s about it. The Good: Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past thirty years, you know that this movie was based on an early New York Times best-selling novel by Stephen King. What I love most about King’s work is that none of his characters are ever straight-laced black and white people. No one is ever just despicably evil, and even the protagonists usually harbor some dastardly secrets. It’s very easy to get ‘into’ the lives of these characters. Each one displays their good and bad side and the reality of their situations becomes easily translated and accessible on the screen. Even the dastardly Steve Kemp first comes to us in the guise of a happy-go-lucky likeable character. But Steve’s got some anger management issues as well, as we learn about three quarters of the way through the film. It’s easy to say that dialogue can be the most compelling factor in trying to illustrate the dynamics between family members. But in this, it is actually the lack of dialogue that appears to be better suited here. There’s a very somber scene in the first act, where Vic, Donna and Tad are sitting at the dinner table. No one is speaking to one another and all you hear are the sounds of silverware scraping along the china. This uncomfortable silence actually reveals quite a bit. It helps to show Donna’s guilty conscience concerning the affair that she’s having and it also shows that Vic suspects that something may be wrong. In a vain effort to break the monotony, Vic makes some sideways remark about ‘having another kid’. The characters laugh, but you can tell that there is little happiness here. This scene is important because it illustrates to us the ILLUSION of a happy family; Big House, big car, good job, etc. This can easily be juxtaposed to the character of Cujo as well. He appears to be a somewhat normal (albeit dirty) pooch, but underneath he’s just a seething cauldron of hostility. Now when reviewing a movie about a rabid dog, I guess its only fair to spend a little time talking about the pooch himself. I was really impressed with the work they did here, and Cujo is without a doubt the showstopper of this whole flick. I know they used a man in a dog-suit for a few shots, but to be honest, you can’t really tell. For the most part, it’s a real dog that’s cracking its skull against the side of the car and not some animatronics or stop-motion clay figurine. I would hate to think what it would be like if this film were re-made today. They would probably CGI the hell out of it just so those pedantic pricks from the humane society wouldn’t get their knickers in a twist. Cujo succeeds in providing us with some intense ‘boo’ moments and the final act offers a great feeling of suspense and claustrophobia. As we watch Donna trapped in the isolation of her prison, we can practically smell the sweat dripping down her neck. You can feel the heat of the sun beating down on you through the windshield of the Trenton pinto and you almost want to NOT believe that there is a big hungry rabid Saint Bernard staring down at you from some hidden corner as you are watching this flick. The psychological elements of this film are what makes the last leg of this journey so enticing and memorable. This is definitely the strongest point in the whole film. (That coupled with the fact that I actually WAS attacked by a rabid canine when I was about Tad’s age kind of increases the intensity for me a bit. Where was MY Jose Coseco bat when I really needed it?) The Bad: As I’m sure many other reviewers have said, this movie is really about lost potential and misplaced priorities. Most of Stephen King’s antagonists usually embody a metaphor for the human condition. Now I’m not familiar with the original source material, but knowing what I know if King’s work, I would think that the central theme behind Cujo is that of ‘what comes around, goes around’. Like John Lennon said, instant Karma is going to get you. Now in the case of Donna Trenton, this works out perfectly. It makes complete sense that she would not only be attacked by the rabid dog but that she would survive it as well. Donna was an adulteress and as such, became a karmic victim of Cujo’s attack. But she was destined to survive however because she recognized her infidelity PRIOR to her husband finding out. This redeems the character a slight bit and the parable is displayed by the fact that she manages to defeat Cujo. By confronting and killing Cujo, she comes to terms with her own sins and rises above them. Well done. The parable works well in the case of Joe Camber as well. Although not outright stated in the movie, we are led to believe that Joe is a cantankerous bastard who likely abuses his family on a routine basis. This is not only suggested by his own behavior but also by the submissive mannerisms of his wife Charity as well. No sooner does Charity leave town with Brett, then Joe is primed and ready to take his wife’s money and use it to go boozing and whoring. In essence he has turned on his family values and betrayed his wife’s trust. Poetic justice being what it is, it makes sense that Cujo (likewise) would turn on his own master and gingerly rip Joe’s throat into thinly layered strips of bacon. Well done again. But this is where the success of the metaphor ends. For reasons unknown, we are given a character, (Steve Kemp) who is thematically primed and ready to be the next Cujo victim. And yet, he never even meets the dog. The Kemp character fails on numerous levels. First off, why did he go apeshit when he discovered that Donna wasn’t home? He seemed like a sensible enough chap, he should have known that their secret love affair could only have been a temporary relationship at best. There is no reason given as to why the character behaves the way he does. On top of that, his later actions all occur off-screen. We see him inside the house calling Donna’s name. Then we see him taking the knife off of the wall. Had he planned on killing her with it? All we see after that is Vic returning home to find that the house had been vandalized. The sheriff later tells him that Steve was arrested and confessed to terrorizing the house. We never actually see the character again. What was the point of this guy? He was obviously meant to be more than just the token back door man, but the director just got lazy halfway through the script and decided to turn what could have been a viable character into a half-baked two-dimensional crackpot. Now if Steve had later tracked Donna down to the Camber farm and been mauled by Cujo, THEN his purpose in the film would have been duly served. But since he wasn’t, it damages the credibility of the whole karma theme. There were two other victims whose inclusion was there solely for the sake of body count; Gary the junkyard dealer and the police officer. Gary got mauled for no other reason than that he was a redneck. And although I’m pretty much fine with that, it does little to serve the theme of the movie. The death of the cop falls prey to this as well. I think screenwriter Don Carlos Dunaway really screwed up in another arena as well. He established that Donna’s plan of escape was to wait for the mailman to show up to deliver the mail, and then she would hitch a ride in his car. Earlier in the film we see that the Camber’s suspended their mail delivery during the time that Charity and Brett were in Connecticut. This makes no sense. Joe Camber stayed at home so why would their mail service be suspended? If you watch the movie, you will learn that he’s waiting on delivery of a car fender for his shop, so I would think that he would want mail service to continue as normal wouldn’t you? If I were Dunaway, I would have just scrapped Donna’s whole ‘wait for the mailman’ plan, since he obviously didn’t have the wherewithal to think the entire thing through. Then there’s the character of Tad (What the fuck kind of name is Tad anyway?). Now while I gave Pintauro props for his excellent performance, I also have to admit that this kid is the single most ANNOYING fucking character on the face of the planet. From start to finish he is a whiney little brat! Now while I understand that he’s only seven-years-old and that he would be subject to a child’s normal inhibitions, did he have to be such a fucking little pussy? There is not a single scene where he comes off as likeable. Cujo is a movie that wets the appetite but unfortunately fails to deliver come crunch time. There are some really high-octane moments towards the end, but we have to wade through a series of half-conceived plot threads before finally getting to them. This is a film that would have been better served as a mini-series allowing time to develop the characters and subplots more. Great Lines: “Fuck you dog.” --Donna feeling cheeky. Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. |
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