Stephen King turned in an early shooting script for Cujo that producer Daniel Blatt felt strayed too far from the source novel. A screenwriter named Lauren Currier was then hired to rewrite and, while her pass hewed with greater fidelity to the book, the draft was overlong and too complicated for the purposes of a 90 minute movie. A third draft by Don Carlos Dunaway trimmed a good deal of the book's first half (which details the twinned troubles of the upper middle class Trenton family and the blue collar Camber clan while charting a disturbing wrinkle in ad man Vic Trenton's sterling career) and eliminated the reincarnation angle entirely to jump to Cujo's raison d'etre: the grueling siege of Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) and her 4-year-old Tad (Danny Pintauro) in their stalled Ford Pinto by the eponymous foaming farm dog. While the worst Stephen King books remain enjoyable in part because of the author's folksy, insightful prose, Cujo suffers from the lack of that authorial voice. A generic, backlot quality creeps into the proceedings early on, making Donna's afternoon trysts with hunky handyman Steve Kemp (Christopher Stone) some of the dullest canoodling ever exposed on celluloid. Even details of young Tad's age-appropriate fear of monsters (familiar hunting grounds for King) feel routine and inurgent.
When Cujo finally gets going, around the 50-minute mark, the film's energy picks up demonstrably and maintains a breathless pace through to the final fade out despite wearing cutaways to other business no one cares about. All credit for Cujo's success go to the acting team of Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro. An appealing, child-like but never precious actress, Wallace had been subspecializing in courage-under-fire performances as far back as Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977). While she will no doubt remain more popular with cult film fans for roles in Joe Dante's The Howling (1982) and Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), Cujo may very well be, if not her finest hour, then her finest 45 minutes. Six-year-old Danny Pintauro is equally remarkable as the imperiled "Tadpole," cowering pitiably in the hatchback of the family car while a monster-dog tries with varying degrees of success to eat his mother. Pintauro's performance (which according to all involved was extraordinarily controlled and professional despite the fact that he was not yet old enough to read) is discomfiting in the extreme and his abject terror difficult to watch. Which is good. If only the filmmakers had crafted a film of substance to complement and support these two above-the-call-of-duty performances.
Cujo was released previously on DVD in 2001 by Artisan in a bare bones package with a pan-and-scanned transfer making the mediocre film even less effective. To commemorate its 25th anniversary, Lionsgate offers Cujo in a handsome 25th Anniversary Edition that preserves the film's enhanced widescreen framing (1.85:1, anamorphically enhanced). There is some grain to the image and a general softness typical of Cujo's vintage but colors and flesh tones are lifelike and the widescreen framing returns some of the modest magic of Jan de Bont's camerawork. The film's original monaural soundtrack is offered alongside a Dolby 2.0 mono upgrade and English and Spanish subtitles ("¿Cujo, que te pasa?") are optional. Lewis Teague is on hand for an amiable and occasionally informative (Teague and de Bont slid the camera on a hubcap to achieve Cujo's lowriding POV) but dull audio commentary. Teague, de Bont, Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, producer Daniel Blatt and Stephen King biographer Douglas E. Winter (aka Video Watchdog's Audio Watchdog) are among the talking heads in a well-produced three-part documentary Dog Days: The Making of Cujo that repeats (and corrects) some of the information (and misinformation) provided by Teague in his solo talk. Lionsgate's menu screens are very nice but make Cujo seem like a grotty descent into the maelstrom on par with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which it clearly isn't. The disc also offers previews of other Lionsgate product, including William Friedkin's return to horror with Bug (2006), the tiresome-looking Most Dangerous game ripoff The Condemned (2007), the ABC miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's Desperation (2006), the Season 5 box set for the USA Network's The Dead Zone spinoff series and Brian Yuzna's Rottweiler which to our way of thinking should be called Roboweiler (2004), not that anyone asked us.
For more information about Cujo, visit Lionsgate. To order Cujo, go to TCM Shopping.
by Richard Harland Smith
