Cujo *** (1983, Dee Wallace, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter, Christopher Stone) – Classic Movie Review 4565

Stephen King’s shaggy dog story about a nice 200lb St Bernard dog, who turns bat-bitten rabid killer and mounts a reign of terror on an American small town, is filmed by director Lewis Teague in 1983 as a straight, edge-of-the-seat horror thriller, abandoning the novel’s supernatural elements.

Unfortunately young boy Brett Camber (Billy Jacoby)’s cute and friendly St Bernard pet Cujo contracts rabies when he is bitten by a rabid bat. Then suburban housewife Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace), whose husband Vic (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) is absent after he learns she is having an affair, drives her five-year-old son Tad (Danny Pintauro) to Brett’s dad’s car shop and the car fails…

There is a lot of the usual barking up familiar trees in the yarn’s slow build-up. And why, oh why didn’t they collar a dog that looked a bit crazier and more terrifying. However, there is plenty of bite once our heroine Donna and her son are terrorised in their car by the slavering Cujo.

Teague again shows that he knows how to handle an effective low-budget chiller, as he did with Alligator (1980). He also made the big-budget The Jewel of the Nile (1985).

It is once again set, as so often with King, in the fictional sleepy New England town of castle Rock, Maine.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4565

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