October 9 - Cujo

This isn't the first time I've reviewed something Stephen King wrote, and it probably won't be the last. I remember reading my first Stephen King book at the age of 7 after borrowing a book from my older sister. I'd been watching her read Christine over a week or so, and she'd finished it and moved onto The Stand, and I picked up Christine and asked her if I could read it. She said "It's scary." with a warning look in her eye. I nodded, opened the book, and have been reading Stephen King on and off for 33 years. I just wanted to thank him before I get into the review. Thanks, Stephen King. I'm a 40 year old, 250-pound man and I'm AFRAID OF THE DARK!!!! THANKS A LOT!!! >:-(

I've seen a lot of movies about monsters, and read lots of books about them, but I think there's a special kind of fear reserved for the one kind of monster that can actually get you... The REAL ones. In this case, there's a monster dog involved, not a mutant one, not one possessed by a demon, not one experimented on in a lab, not a werewolf in disguise... Nope, just an ordinary, oversized, happy, fun-loving old doggy... who has been infected with RABIES. It takes a unique kind of sick, twisted mind to take man's best friend and turn him into a terrifyingly lethal engine of destruction, and Stephen King, that warped, fevered old bastard, has such a mind.

The movie starts out by showing you Cujo, a big St. Bernard, chasing a bunny rabbit through a field. Cujo never quite catches up to the rabbit, and the rabbit flees down a hole under a stump or soemthing, and Cujo, big mutt that he is, stuffs his head into the hole and unleashes a resoundingly powerful round of barking that angers a bunch of bats. Which then bite him. Oh, we're not talking like a swarm of bees here, they don't maul him by the dozens or anything. Nope, just one little bat nips Cujo's poor little nosy and that's all it takes. The virus has spread to a new host. At least, I think it's a virus.

Oh, Cujo doesn't turn right away. Much like in humans, and yes, rabies can infect humans and runs a similar course, Cujo just shrugs off the bite and returns to his home, a lonely barn at the end of a road with owners who fix cars, feed him, play with him, and give him nice quiet dark places to sleep in. Quiet dark places, like under the porch stairs, for instance.

I'm sure everyone has seen this film by now, so I'm just going to go ahead with a full review of it. Basically, this guy in advertising and his wife and son are going through some problems. The wife is having an affair, the kid is scared of monsters, and the guy's ad campaign is sunk when the cereal he's selling causes internal bleeding, or what looks like it, when too much red dye is used in the cereal and kids are shitting and pissing red. Yea, disaster for anyone, right? So in the midst of all this, the ad guy has to run off to a meeting with his bosses to try and save the ad campaign. His wife, meanwhile, has to run their crappy little pinto up to the local repairman... who happens to have a pet dog named Cujo. Oh yes, I love it when a plan comes together.

Cujo, meanwhile, has gone on a two-person killing spree, ending the life of the mechanic and his neighbor by tearing them apart, and is certainly not pleased when the lady's pinto drives up and stalls. Cujo attacks almost immediately, and the woman and her son are forced to hide in the car for the next three days while the baking sun dehydrates them and Cujo both. After several failed attempts to start the car, make it into the house and otherwise get out of their present predicament, a cop car pulls up to the house, but a holstered gun is no match for a rabid angry dog, and the cop suffers a violent, bloody death. Shortly thereafter, the woman's son suffocates in the back seat of the car, and in a state of panic, the mom runs out of the car to the house... where Cujo is waiting. The mother manages to get ahold of a nearby baseball bat before Cujo gets to her, and beats the dog senseless with it, but the bat breaks and Cujo leaps onto her, only to be impaled by the broken bat handle. The mother grabs her son, gets him into the house and manages to revive him, just in time for Cujo to attack again! :-o

My only problem with this movie is that it spends an awful lot of time focusing on the clueless ad guy, his faithless slut of a wife, and the chickenshit little kid. Yea yea, I know, Stephen King's strength lies in his ability to depict real people in unreal situations, but dammit, I don't really care about these people. The acting is good, though, and the movie builds up for almost it's entire length, and there's few if any other characters. There's probably a lot more going on in the book, and I remember reading it when I was younger (not that I remember it now), but I didn't really identify with anyone in this movie. Still, aside from the commercials I had to put up with because it was on a damn commercial-loving channel, it wasn't a bad movie at all.

In fact, it's movies like this that remind me why I can't keep pets. Well, that and I can't even take care of a plant without killing it. I'm not a very good nurturer, okay?