Hello and welcome to another Sundays with Stephen at Here Comes Tomorrow. This week’s film is a dog. Well, it’s a dog about a dog.

Eh, screw the humor; I’m not entirely up for levity this time. Cujo blows goats in hell. Read below the cut to find out why.

(For purposes of style and convention, henceforth, when I refer to the name of a King book, it will be underlined. When I refer to the name of a movie based on the book, it will be italicized, and when I’m talking about a character from the book/movie, it will be capitalized but otherwise unadorned)

I suppose a little personal background is appropriate, in the name of full disclosure. Cujo was one of the first King books I ever read, perhaps the first (I can’t recall if it was Cujo, Firestarter or possibly The Tommyknockers). It was in the summer of ’96, I think. I spent most of that summer walking to and from the county library, trapped as I was in small town Indiana, without even dialup internet to stave off madness, and no school to fill my days. I went through much of the town’s science fiction section, then started moving through the horror. After reading perhaps half a dozen Dean Koontz books (I know, I’m not proud either, but I was 13, ok?) I decided to give Stephen King a try.

Dean Koontz really is like King with training wheels… and 10% of the talent. Honestly, you could write his books by mad lib, they’re so predictable, but that’s a topic for another time.

After reading Cujo, I remember someone told me that they’d made a live action movie out of it, and I couldn’t believe it. “How” I asked myself, “do you make a movie out of Cujo? Half the book is written from the perspective of the DOG!”

I couldn’t imagine how to do that with a live action dog; neither could the people who made the actual movie.

Introductory material aside: Cujo. Cujo is about a small family living, of course, in the blasted purgatory that is Maine (in the fictional and especially doomed town of Castle Rock, specifically). This family consists of a father Vic, his adulterous wife Donna, and their young boy, Tad. If there’s one thing more dangerous in a King book than being in Maine, it’s being someone’s young boy. There is a parallel story involving the family of a local mechanic, who owns the eponymous dog, and some worldbuilding stuff involving Castle Rock, too. Cujo the novel boils down to two stories. First, you have the story of the dog, bitten, neglected, and slowly descending into agonizing madness and rage. This is, by necessity, almost entirely absent from the film. (We’ll call that the B plot) The rest of the story is a means to set a very particular stage: The mechanic and his family are disposed of and away from home, respectively. Donna and Tad take their broken down POS out to the mechanic’s house for repairs, where it dies for good, trapping them alone on the property with a very large and extremely rabid animal. (Call this the A plot)

As you can see, Cujo doesn’t involve any overtly supernatural elements. More than any other King novel, at least any I’ve read, it’s grounded in the real world, with real world consequences. Cujo’s case of rabies is, shall we say, slightly exaggerated, but other than that the drama comes from being trapped in a hopeless situation, mother and son dying slowly and alone, in terror.

The movie, having excised the B plot written from inside the dog’s head, plays the A plot pretty straight. Donna cheats on Vic with the ‘town stud’, which involves a laughable bit of casting if ever there was one. Vic finds out and reacts with the bare minimum RDA of emotion. The family of the Camber the mechanic leaves him, he gets offed, and the three characters that matter end up in a face-off in the hot summer sun.

There are a number of doofy things about the execution, however. Cujo’s makeup for starters.. I’ve seen better fake blood. I’ve *made* better fake blood, actually. What they lack in authenticity they make up for in quantity; the dog is drowning in blood, gore, snot, dirt and filth by the end of the picture. If you ever saw that old Family Double Dare show on Nickolodeon, where they would drop buckets of slime on unsuspecting parents? Yeah, it’s like that.

We never get any real motivation for Donna and Vic. They both like their predictably adorable, focus-group approved son Tad. Who wouldn’t? The worst thing he ever does is be scared of the closet monster, and that’s more endearing than anything else. (The closet monster is also the movie’s best moment, a neat bit of trickery with cameras and sets to show how terrifying a darkened bedrooom can be to a small child)

(Just once I’d like to see a difficult kid that the parents love anyway. Not Hollywood difficult, where they don’t like to do their homework. Plays with matches difficult.)

Donna and Vic’s marriage is a mystery. She doesn’t seem to particularly love or hate him; he loves her the same way I love the chair I’m sitting in: It’s comfortable and it’s always here. That might explain his peculiar lack of feeling upon discovering the affair… I wouldn’t freak out if my chair ‘cheated’ on me, either. It’s a great chair too, used to belong to my step-grandad.

Ultimately the A plot of Cujo comes down to the car scene, however. How well do they capture the experience of being trapped and doomed, within sight of your salvation?

Eh. It’s a wash, really. There’s some good acting, some ridiculous special effects for Cujo, some bad acting, another incredibly lame ‘spinning camera equals drama’ trick like in Carrie (this one goes on so long it made my roommate dizzy). It’s ok, right up until they gut the ending like a fish.

Ok, huge spoiler here. Don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie or the film, and just take my word that they ruin the ending completely.

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Ok. In the book, after two solid days in a hot car with no food and little water, Donna is on her last legs. Tad is dying, she’s been bitten by Cujo, and she makes a break for it. There’s a very tense final confrontation with the dog, whom she manages to kill with a broken baseball bat.

Only this is the real world. Remember those real world consequences I mentioned above? In the real world, people don’t always survive their last minute escapes. In this case, by the time Donna kills Cujo, Tad is already dead from heatstroke, and she just doesn’t realize it. The heroine wins, the monster is vanquished, but the innocent is already dead.

That really stuck with me as a kid. It’s a way that King is a horror writer for grownups, and Koontz is for the junior readers. In a Koontz book, the good guy, his attractive female love interest, the adorable kid AND the dog make it out alive. Seriously, that’s the ending to at least two thirds of the Koontz books I read: Man, dog, kid, woman, happily ever after.

With King, the kid dies, the family is shattered, and the dog gets his brain impaled on an oversized splinter.

The movie, however, changes this. First, Donna and Cujo have it out, but they cut away from Cujo being impaled. “Ruh-roh”, I thought to myself, “That’s suspiciously convenient.” So Donna gets the gun a dead, and thoroughly dumb, secondary character dropped, and points it at Cujo. Ok, fine; I started the old movie game of shouting out “SHOOT HIM!” while she had the loaded revolver trained on her foe… only she never fires. She never even checks the body! Instead she takes Tad inside and tries to revive him.

“This shouldn’t work,” I think to myself. Yes, you can see the child actor breathing if you look really closely, but TAD is dead. I know he is. It’s important; his death means something. Badly administered CPR shouldn’t change that.

Only it does. Tad lives. I was almost throwing things at my own screen. It gets better: Cujo? STILL ALIVE. He bursts in through a sugar glass window so that Donna can ace him with the pistol, the way she should have when he was lying on the ground three minutes previously. I called it the Dirty Harry ending at first, but in retrospect, it’s more like the Die Hard ending.

Vic arrives just in time to see Donna carrying their still living son outside of the house; there’s literally a freeze frame on the happy, reunited family. Roll credits; cue vomiting.

This adaptation is revolting. I’m beginning to worry that I wasn’t hard enough on Carrie, say, because I didn’t read the original… are most King adaptations this soulless? Am I being too personal about this particular story? I don’t know.

I’m going to keep a closer eye out for King movies based on stories I’ve actually consumed, however. There’s an old truism about newspapers that I catch myself thinking about, here: on the subject you know best, the paper gets it all wrong; on the stuff you don’t know, however, they seem to get it all right.

Maybe I need to hit the books for this experiment.

Next Week: The Dead Zone, aka the closest Christopher Walken will EVER get to an Oscar!
Last Week: Creepshow