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Cujo

Cujo (1983)

August. 12,1983
|
6.1
|
R
| Horror Thriller

A friendly St. Bernard named "Cujo" contracts rabies and conducts a reign of terror on a small American town.

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Smoreni Zmaj
1983/08/12

I didn't read the original story by King, so I can not judge on how faithful adaptation is, but movie alone is barely watchable. It is not complete crap, but it is not much above it either. Technically this movie is mediocre. Level of entertainment... well, I had to force myself to stick to it till the end. But I must admit that has some really scary parts. Most of it is boring and redundant, but few scenes really made me shiver. If they could make whole thing at least half that intense it could have been really good horror/drama. But this way it does not deserve more than 4, being average of 7 for scary parts and 2 for every other aspect of the movie.4/10!!! SPOILER ALERT !!! - specific objections to the story:First half an hour show us family relations in house of the victims and wife's love affair that has no influence to main course of the story. It is like they put it in film only to pull on enough material for 90 minutes movie. That part is painfully boring. - Wife and kid are stuck in a car for 48 hours and nobody noticed they're missing. Is it possible/probable that they have no family, friends, neighbors or anyone else they have everyday communication with and who would notice they're missing... - They are in courtyard of local mechanic, just 7 miles from their home. Is it possible/probable that no one knows where they're gone, no one stopped by to fix their car or came across for any other reason for whole two days and nights... - Cop that finally starts searching for them soon comes across their car all battered and covered in blood. logical sequence of procedures would be to park police car close to victims, use police radio to call backup and tell what he saw, then pull out his gun and carefully get out of the car and go to take a look into victims car. In that case victim would tell him what is happening and he would have two options. Either to carefully look for the beast and kill it or to get victims into police car and get a hell out of there while calling the competent service to solve the issue. Instead he parks far away from bloody car, does not call for backup or at least to say where he is and what he found, gets out of the car unarmed and nonchalantly strolls across the yard. Of course, beast lurks and grabs him by surprise. and when he finally decides to use his gun he is too freaked and clumsy so he drops his gun on the ground and he gets killed. Cops may be believed to be stupid, but this kind of carelessness is in contrary with basic instincts of self- preservation. - At the end, when mother finally succeeds to defend her child by sticking broken baseball bat into beast, she takes gun from the ground and gets into house without even checking if the beast is really dead. Those bolder would probably approach the beast to check if it's still alive, but everyone would at least empty whole magazine into it just in case. She did neither and of course, she gets attacked from behind once again. Completely retarded.There is more smaller illogicalities and nonsense, but what I listed above should be enough to justify my 4/10. For a moments scary, but mostly dull and poorly told life drama. Without those few emotionally strong moments this movie would barely deserve 2/10.

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destinylives52
1983/08/13

Based on the novel by Stephen King, "Cujo" is about a rabid Saint Bernard who terrorizes a mother (played by Dee Wallace) and her young son (played by Danny Pintauro). Trapped in a small, Ford Pinto that doesn't start, Wallace and Pintauro spend several agonizing days in the heat inside their car, unable to escape with Cujo just waiting for them nearby. No cell phones, no neighborsÂ…if Wallace doesn't make a desperate attempt to flee or kill Cujo, she and her son will surely die in the car from heat exhaustion and dehydration. My most memorable, movie moment of "Cujo" is the scene when Wallace has her car door open and trying to take care of Pintauro, and Cujo appears behind her and goes in for the kill. Although "Cujo" feels at times like a made for TV movie (most of the director's work is in TV), it is still a good horror/suspense movie that continues to be relevant today with all the reported dog attacks against humans.Mannysmemorablemoviemoments

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Bill Slocum
1983/08/14

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.

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talisencrw
1983/08/15

This was solid and unexpectedly fulfilling--perhaps because I'm a cat enthusiast and am neutral towards dogs to begin with. My 13-year-old son and I enjoyed it very much. I haven't read the book yet, so it's unnecessary for enjoyment of the movie IMHO. Worth both a purchase and rewatching for genre aficionados. So far, I'm neither much of a fan of Teague (I had only previously watched 'The Jewel of the Nile', and it was decent) nor of Stephen King (he's written some great works for horror, but he's written a lot of dreck and is criminally overrated), but I was really pleasantly surprised by it--and even though it was made in the 80's, it's neither cheesy nor dated; it still holds up very well IMHO.

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