Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Executscan Expected more

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

artisan There is always same kind of feeling about the movies based upon King's novels. They are intriguing, and makes you wonder throughout the entire movie. Also, details of the everyday life, some common aspects our lives were put very will in King's books as well as to movies in a highly creative way that it is highly unlikely to not to surprise even though what you are observing is pretty simple and a familiar occurrence. It's all because of King's imaginative, creative way of thinking solid and simple. You're going to witness here how a peaceful dog turns out to be something else, but the general atmosphere and the harmony of everything is worth your attention.

Bill Slocum A tense standoff between two carbound people and a rabid St. Bernard is the fulcrum of this well-acted, beautifully shot yet unsatisfying adaptation of a minor Stephen King novel.Donna (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintuaro) are the humans trying to stave off the title character, a dog which, infected by a bat bite, has now entered shaggy Terminator status. Before we get there, though, we get some business involving Donna's problematic marriage and Tad's fear of the unknown."There's no such thing as monsters," Tad is told by his patient pa, Vic (Daniel Hugh-Kelly). "Only in stories." Especially Stephen King stories, unfortunately.The root of the problem for the film "Cujo" is the source material. Written by King in the throes of alcoholism, "Cujo" the novel was a largely formulaic endeavor enlivened only by King's storytelling abilities and his sneaky social commentary about commercialism run amuck in a world of lost values. It's a work of craft rather than imagination, with a downbeat ending King himself encouraged the film's producers to jettison.Unfortunately, the constraints of the film also required them to jettison the parts of "Cujo" that might have made an audience care. Vic is an advertising executive whose major breakfast cereal account is undone by too much red dye in the product, causing children to vomit red. "Nothing wrong here" is the cereal company's tag line, which in the novel becomes a motif for what happens when the unexpected invades our comfy lives.But this isn't the book, and so here you have only nods in the direction of the cereal issue and Donna's left-field affair with a hirsute handyman (Christopher Stone, Wallace's real-life husband) before moving on to the dog attacks which is the film's reason for being.Director Lewis Teague tries setting up a backstory in the limited time available to him, yet the whiffs of subplot wind up fluttering loose ends. Instead, you are left with the standoff for the latter half of the film. Much of the focus here is on the woman and her child, who cries and then suffers an asthma attack. Did Tad always have this condition, and if so, why isn't it mentioned beforehand?Teague was more focused on the dog, and on his star, Wallace, who gives a fine account of a person trying to manage under great stress. Her often-harrowing scenes with Pintuaro work surprisingly well, but seeing them cooped up in her crapped-out Ford Pinto (adding new meaning to the term "unsafe at any speed") while Cujo either bides his time or leaps at the windows whenever noise sets him off becomes an unintended ordeal in tedium.I really love the work of cinematographer Jan de Bont, who keeps us in suspense even when the screenwriters (helped by an uncredited King) provide little real action. De Bont, along with the acting, does a great deal to ground us in the reality of the moments, such as they are."Cujo" is a horror movie only in the broadest sense, though, with sudden scares in place of catharsis. Too much attention is paid to showcasing Wallace. One scene features her smashing a window with a revolver as she lets out an enormous scream, a bit rendered silly in slow motion.The movie doesn't so much end as run out of time and ideas, with a final sequence that culminates in an unrealistic attack followed by a freeze-frame shot with soaring music that, like so much of the score, feels goofy and trite. The effort at emulating John Williams' "Jaws" score is "Cujo" the movie's most glaring weakness.The book ends in a decidedly different way, and I feel strongly that the movie, for all its faults, does better here at least. But by taking an already somewhat-denuded King story and making it even slimmer in terms of human interest, "Cujo" can't help but be a let-down, a would-be satire of commercialism that winds up being too commercial itself.

oOoBarracuda 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.

Leofwine_draca Forget BEETHOVEN and any other shaggy dog story you may have watched or read - CUJO is the real deal. Based on one of Stephen King's lesser-known, earlier books, this is a non-supernatural horror-cum-thriller which centres around a large, lovable, dopey St. Bernard which gets bitten (right on the nose - ouch!) by a rabid bat and eventually goes on a savage spree of slaughter. Now, this is one scary dog. Getting progressively more evil-looking as the film progresses, it ends up as a huge, unstoppable monster with a little instinct and one covered in gore. Not a bad leap from the initially cuddly family pet it started off as. Definitely the scariest dog I've seen in a film, except maybe for that one in THE OMEN which was pretty damn frightening too.Unfortunately the dog Cujo doesn't figure too much in the first hour of this film, which is so caught up in boring character exposition that it almost forgets about the title character entirely, instead popping him up brief scenes throughout of him gradually getting dirtier and messier and more feral as the effects of the rabies virus take hold. Until the last half hour, which is one long set piece, we have to make do with everyday characters going about their not-very-interesting lives. Dee Wallace-Stone (THE HOWLING) is a cheating wife and mother, married to the boring Daniel Hugh Kelly. The pair have a bratty, whining little kid (another obnoxious child, here played by Danny Pintauro) who has asthma attacks at the most inappropriate times and keeps threatening to die (and by god, I wish he would). The rest of the small town hicks are fairly predictable folks, despite heavy attempts at characterisation to make them more interesting.The last half hour of this film is great stuff and contains numerous frightening scenes to make up for the lack of them in the first hour. Basically, Wallace and Pintauro are trapped in a car in the middle of nowhere whilst Cujo lays siege to them, smashing the car to pieces in some ferocious attacks that play on everyone's fear of dogs as unpredictable, snarling beasts. Very taut and suspenseful, this is a text book example of setting a movie in just one location and having lots of fun with it. The ending may be predictable but at least its clean and there's an (un)surprising twist to come at the warm-hearted family reunion in the kitchen.The acting is passable, yet nobody here shines much. Dee Wallace-Stone comes off the best and is given the most emoting as the housewife caught in the middle of a nightmarish situation and she puts in another strong turn. Danny Pintauro is saddled with a hateful character so it's not really fair to judge his acting (and can it be said that child actors truly act anyways?). Daniel Hugh Kelly is okay but has a boring character whilst Christopher Stone is badly miscast as the town stud (instead he resembles a neanderthal). Two familiar faces, lower down in the cast, are Ed Lauter and Jerry Hardin who would both go on to appear in THE X-FILES television series.Director Lewis Teague (ALLIGATOR ) handles the proceedings with some level of skill and he's assisted by the superior camera-work skills of Jan De Bont, who adds a glossy sheen to the look of the film. It's just a shame that, until the end, they don't have more interesting material to work with. The dog attacks are fairly brutal without being gory and, with the use of a few real dogs, a mechanical head (and even a guy in a dog suit at one point!) the film-makers create a convincing menace that becomes scary due to the realism. In the end, CUJO is a good attempt at a horror movie, albeit a rather dull one saved by the superior climax.