I inaugurated the year in movie-watching with Cujo a couple weeks ago. As with the book, the movie is not as bad as the reputation it carries of a psycho-dog killing random people. In fact, I was a little surprised by what seemingly-minor things were retained from the book, while other major plot points were cut. I honestly did not expect to see the Sharp Cereal Professor, but there he was foolishly pushing Red Raspberry Zingers. Meanwhile, Charity and Brett get out of town and you never see them again. Other changes I rolled with, given the running time of the movie was quite compact, such as Steve being some kind of family friend, already known to Vic. I also believe nobody was sad about omitting Steve leaving a....ahem...."gift" on the upstairs bed when he trashed the house.
Of course, there was one huge change from the book, which came from Stephen King himself. In the book, the big shocker is the death of Tad. On one hand, killing off children, even in the 1980's, was still a touchy area for movies. However, according to the vast amount of ink and pixels devoted to this change King apparently carried a heavy amount of regret for his decision to kill Tad in the book, so he "atoned" for it in the movie. Make no mistake, though, this movie is still really scary, probably the scariest one I've seen yet. I'm usually pretty good at separating real life from what's behind the screen, but the terror of being trapped in a car with a screaming child on the inside and a rabid dog on the outside is downright visceral.
Location, as you know, is always an area of scrutiny for me. I believe to date in this project, only one movie purported to take place somewhere in Maine was actually filmed in Maine. Alas, that was the wretched Graveyard Shift, proving location only isn't going to save a turkey. Cujo, as was the case with many of the early King movies, was filmed in California, in locations north of the Bay Area, with a bit of Utah thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, it doesn't look much like Maine, although if one disregards that, the redneck-chic of Joe Camber's garage/hovel is pretty much the way I envisioned it when reading the book. Again, this is one of the earlier Stephen King movies, the third one (after Carrie and The Shining) to be made into a feature film, just a few months ahead of The Dead Zone, in fact. To date this was one of the fastest page-to-screen jobs in King's bibliography.
Finally, an unusual little challenge for a movie like Cujo, even if it isn't all non-stop dog-killing-man action, is how to handle your animal actors. There are places that go into way more depth on this, so I won't repeat it all here, but let's just say that the actor-dog was quite the opposite of the role he portrayed. The silly dog ruined many a scene because he wanted to lick off the tasty "gore" put on him by the makeup department! I wonder if an outtake reel exists somewhere. It just might soothe any stray nightmares this movie left with you.
