Cujo (1983)

Rated R for being generally traumatic, especially when it comes to children in actual peril.  Like, Tad screaming and being afraid of the dog is actually pretty darned upsetting.  But there's also a moderate amount of gore.  You don't really get gore from violence, but Cujo, as the story progresses, gets more and more funky.  There's also an affair in the story that leads to an attempted rape.  While there is no nudity, it is pretty visceral.  Couple that with some language and this movie has a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Lewis Teague

I'm gaming the system, guys.  I will say that I watched Cujo the honest way.  It was on the schedule.  I watched it during the workout.  But I know that tomorrow is Halloween and I really want to get the last Final Destination movie out before I close up October.  So I decided to jump ahead of the TV show that I was supposed to watch in-between and knock out that last entry.  Maybe there's a scenario that I am able to write about both Cujo and Final Destination: Bloodlines before people start heading out for Trick-or-Treating.  We'll see.

A lot of this blog is going to be a discussion about the book and the movie.  Like my blog of Christine, I just finished the novel, which inspired a viewing of the film adaptation.  Like with Christine, I was skeptical at the notion of Cujo as a story.  After all, it seems like a rabid dog seems like a fairly minor threat for a Stephen King novel.   Well, guess what?  Stephen King was probably aware of that and simply embraced it.  In my head, a rabid dog should be taken out by a stray bullet.  Heck, King even acknolwedges it in the novel by citing Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.  He knows what's up.  A dog shouldn't be able to rip apart a town, so King lets the story be incredibly small.  And, can I tell you something?  That's so good.  

There's something refreshing about the notion of a story understanding that scope matters.  While I'm a big fan of Avengers: Age of Ultron (against everyone else's opinion), I do wish that Whedon's initial statement about the movie held true.  Not every story has to be about escalation.  Where Cujo thrives is understanding that characters matter.  Ultimately, I find it weird that the book and the adaptation are called Cujo.  Yeah, the dog is the threat to all of the characters.  In the same way that Christine killed folks, Cujo is responsible for all of the deaths in the story.  Okay, except for those committed before this book with Frank Dodd.  (Now I wish that I read The Dead Zone first, another book that I own.  Frank Dodd was a character in that one.) In some ways, the story is so small that it almost reads as a disaster film.  I know.  Disaster stories tend to be large in scope.  But really, a disaster narrative tends to focus on a core group of characters who must survive the impossible.  There's no malice on the part of the disaster.  There are deaths in the background.  But we tend to care about these characters against something that can't be fought directly.  We care about Donna and Tad.  Yeah, Cujo can rip through Deputy / Sheriff Bannerman and Joe Camber all day long.  But those are just establishing that the disaster is something that needs to be taken seriously.  When we watch a disaster movie, those characters are so expendable that they often don't even have names.  

And the threat to Tad and Donna isn't necessarily the dog either.  Yeah, Cujo will get them if they leave the car.  The movie and the book go through a lot of backflip establishing that there's a good chance that Cujo is unable to get into the Pinto.  He can damage it pretty good.  He can give them some pretty good scares.  But both versions of the story seem pretty keen on Cujo being on the outside and the real danger is on the inside.  It's a story about setting because that car is getting hot and no one is coming to get them.  There's no food.  There's no water.  Any attempt at self-care is going to be violated by this Saint Bernard with rabies outside.  I mean, the dog dies by baseball bat (and revolver, if the movie is to be believed).  That isn't exactly Jason.  Instead, what kind of spirals out of this claustropobia-inducing car is the notion that Donna doesn't know what she's doing.  

There's some really cool stuff going on with Donna in terms of storytelling coupled with some mildly gross, kinda-sorta sexist stuff going on here.  Let's put the gross stuff first.  Vic is a bit of a Mary Sue in this story.  He's the perfect man, who has been wronged by the woman in his life.  Yes, we are supposed to have a mild level of sympathy for Donna, whose relationship with Steve Kemp was due to the slow death of a marriage.  But Vic never really faces many of his own demons in this story.  King points out that, in the heat of an arguement, Vic says something that he can't take back.  But ultimately, the slight is mild in the grand scheme of things and Vic's biggest crime is that he can't see past his own victim blinders to consider that Donna and Tad might be at the Cambers.  I don't love that Donna is so demonized through the story that we have to question her ability to mother because she has had this affair in the first two acts of the story.  It does color some of the characterization, especially when she takes out her frustration on Tad.  It also kind of hurts that Donna is juxtaposed to Vic, who is such a good father that it makes her seem incompetent, no matter what she does.  Sure, it makes compelling storytelling.  But I do wish that Vic sucked just a little more so it didn't make Donna look like a demon.

But what is interesting is that it talks about how fallible a parent is.  That's the story.  Again, I find it weird that the film is called Cujo because the story is about Donna in the car.  I mean, King made the right choice. The fact that this killer Saint Bernard is part of the cultural zeitgeist means that King was doing his job properly.  Still, the story is ultimately about mother and son and feeling helpless in the light of something that no one can control.  King spends a lot of the story pulling every safety net away from these characters.  In reality, the odds of these two being stuck in this boiling hot car for multiple days is addressed.  After all, Donna is right.  The postman should be coming to deliver the mail.  Vic should be able to return home and figure out that the car is missing instead of thinking that Steve Kemp kidnapped his family.  There are all these beats that force Donna to go through the unthinkable.  Her son is dying in front of her and she feels helpless to do anything about it.  That's the story and I find that story completely intriguing.  

And maybe that's what I'm slightly frustrated with this movie.  I don't want to throw any stones at the acting.  I want to commend Danny Pintauro as Tad.  Honestly, this is a kid acting.  It's the most effective thing that I've ever seen.  Pintauro did such a realistic job of being a terrified kid that I was kind of concerned that Teague was pulling a Stanley Kubrick and torturing his actors to get a proper reaction.  I mean, I really hope that's not the case because I've seen scared kids before and it looks like Tad in Cujo.  But Teague, as functional as this movie is, doesn't really push cinema too hard in this movie.  The film hits all of the beats of the book.  I mean, when I say that this is a faithful adaptation, for the most part, of the novel, I cannot stress enough how many of the details that this movie hits.  But in the process of doing that, we forgot that the crux of the film needs to be about Donna in that car.  While those scenes are great and do the job, I don't know if I get enough of the inner turmoil of Donna.  If anything, I get the idea that she's scared, which is what a horror movie does.  But I don't see a lot of the self-reproach that I kind of imagine Donna should be having.  In my head, there's a lot of failing to hold it together for the sake of Tad.  Instead, I get the vibe that Tad is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  It's Tad's reaction that makes the entire third act scary.  

The choice to let Tad survive is a choice for sure.  Leonard Maltin had a problem with Tad suriviving. This makes me feel a little bit gross, but I do think that cinema has always made kid death taboo.  I mean, the core of Pet Sematary is about kid death.  But it does matter that Tad survives this one.  I don't know if it is make-or-break.  But it still resonates with me.
​
So part of me is kind of thinking that the film adaptation of Cujo is as effective as a movie about a book can be.  But I also wanted something with a bit more personality.  There are times where Cujo almost reads as a made-for-TV movie.  It's good.  It hits all of the notes.  But I don't get a lot of soul (outside of Tad) for this movie.  Still, I don't regret watching this one.  It does the job and that's not the worst thing in the world.