Review of Cujo (1983) by Michael M — 18 Oct 2017

One of the better Stephen King adaptations, but still not the best. It takes a while to get going and ends rather abruptly. Also, and this is more on King than the filmmakers, I didn't really like how Cujo himself was handled.

If this was about the dog going after his owners, that would be heartbreaking and horrifying. Instead it's about him going after this random woman and her kid because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Cujo's actual owners are a pretty unlikable bunch of white trash.

So I never really got the tragedy in the good dog turned bad by rabies thing, that never worked for me here. I also didn't like how long the movie took to get to the stuff you really wanted to see, the mom and her kid in the car.

We see this sort of contained thriller a lot more often now with movies like Frozen (not the Disney one) and Buried, but it was less common in the 80s. Maybe that's why they were afraid to make it more than 30 minutes of the movie.

Having said that, those 30 minutes are really good. It raises the "what would I do?" question a lot, and whenever they try to leave the car for some reason the tension instantly ratchets up.

The kid crying when the dog attacks gets a little annoying, but this almost adds to the tension you know the mom must be feeling in that moment. If you cut the movie down to just those 30 minutes and maybe 10 minutes of exposition getting there, it would be short, but it would be a masterpiece of horror cinema.

Having said that, the other hour of this thing isn't bad, it's just not that good. It's an okay movie with an amazing final act that elevates the whole thing just enough to make an above average movie overall.