St Bernard's are so friendly but not Cujo when he is bitten by a bat that turns him rabid and goes on a killing spree.Poor Donna (Dee Wallace) who along with her son is getting her husband's car fixed by Joe, Cujo's owner. As she pulls into his farmhouse , Donna finds herself trapped inside the car as Cujo is ready to pounce. His face covered in blood and his mind gone insane.This Stephen King adaptation is really a thin story. Director Lewis Teague tries to crank up some tension but it is only effective in the latter part of the film as Donna is trapped in the car with her son getting poorly.Some nice, effective cinematography by Jan De Bont.

The first time I watched Cujo, I expected just a horror show. Well, I think this movie is a lot more. I will admit that I think Dee Wallace is a Super Star. In Cujo Dee Wallace portrays the most powerful force in the universe = a mother protecting her offspring. She faces down the monster with only the thought to save her child. This part of the plot is powerful enough to carry a horror movie. Interwoven in the movie is another plot of a woman married and with a child who explores an extramarital relationship. And of course this "lover" turns out to be a scoundrel supreme. Christopher Stone gives an outstanding performance as the spurned lover. Dee Wallace makes this movie.

Cujo is just a great horror film, plain and simple, it just is. Now I haven't seen all of Stephen King's work, although I have seen his classics like misery and the Shining. I actually thought that cujo was better than the shining, but not quite as good as something like misery. The story is just very well told through film, I cannot recommend the book because I have not read it, but I can recommend this movie for horror or thriller lovers. Also the acting is done really well especially by Dee Wallace! Dee really pulled off a great performance here. And she delivers one of the best lines I've ever heard in a film: f**k you dog! Cujo definitely knows what will scare and it uses that. Also I think the run time and the pacing of the movie is spot on. I believe it's about an hour and 32 minutes, which is just right for this movie because really it doesn't need to be long if this movie specifically was overly long, then you would bore and lose the audience. And I think they did a good job at making the dog look borderline demonic and just downright evil. So all in all I think this was a great book to film Stephen King adaptation that I recommend to horror and thriller movie fans. 8/10 for Cujo!

Forget BEETHOVEN and any other shaggy dog story you may have watched or read - CUJO is the real deal. Based on one of Stephen King's lesser-known, earlier books, this is a non-supernatural horror-cum-thriller which centres around a large, lovable, dopey St. Bernard which gets bitten (right on the nose - ouch!) by a rabid bat and eventually goes on a savage spree of slaughter. Now, this is one scary dog. Getting progressively more evil-looking as the film progresses, it ends up as a huge, unstoppable monster with a little instinct and one covered in gore. Not a bad leap from the initially cuddly family pet it started off as. Definitely the scariest dog I've seen in a film, except maybe for that one in THE OMEN which was pretty damn frightening too.Unfortunately the dog Cujo doesn't figure too much in the first hour of this film, which is so caught up in boring character exposition that it almost forgets about the title character entirely, instead popping him up brief scenes throughout of him gradually getting dirtier and messier and more feral as the effects of the rabies virus take hold. Until the last half hour, which is one long set piece, we have to make do with everyday characters going about their not-very-interesting lives. Dee Wallace-Stone (THE HOWLING) is a cheating wife and mother, married to the boring Daniel Hugh Kelly. The pair have a bratty, whining little kid (another obnoxious child, here played by Danny Pintauro) who has asthma attacks at the most inappropriate times and keeps threatening to die (and by god, I wish he would). The rest of the small town hicks are fairly predictable folks, despite heavy attempts at characterisation to make them more interesting.The last half hour of this film is great stuff and contains numerous frightening scenes to make up for the lack of them in the first hour. Basically, Wallace and Pintauro are trapped in a car in the middle of nowhere whilst Cujo lays siege to them, smashing the car to pieces in some ferocious attacks that play on everyone's fear of dogs as unpredictable, snarling beasts. Very taut and suspenseful, this is a text book example of setting a movie in just one location and having lots of fun with it. The ending may be predictable but at least its clean and there's an (un)surprising twist to come at the warm-hearted family reunion in the kitchen.The acting is passable, yet nobody here shines much. Dee Wallace-Stone comes off the best and is given the most emoting as the housewife caught in the middle of a nightmarish situation and she puts in another strong turn. Danny Pintauro is saddled with a hateful character so it's not really fair to judge his acting (and can it be said that child actors truly act anyways?). Daniel Hugh Kelly is okay but has a boring character whilst Christopher Stone is badly miscast as the town stud (instead he resembles a neanderthal). Two familiar faces, lower down in the cast, are Ed Lauter and Jerry Hardin who would both go on to appear in THE X-FILES television series.Director Lewis Teague (ALLIGATOR ) handles the proceedings with some level of skill and he's assisted by the superior camera-work skills of Jan De Bont, who adds a glossy sheen to the look of the film. It's just a shame that, until the end, they don't have more interesting material to work with. The dog attacks are fairly brutal without being gory and, with the use of a few real dogs, a mechanical head (and even a guy in a dog suit at one point!) the film-makers create a convincing menace that becomes scary due to the realism. In the end, CUJO is a good attempt at a horror movie, albeit a rather dull one saved by the superior climax.