Cujo (1983)

Lewis Teague's Cujo arrives from 1983, a year when a rabid St. Bernard could still carry an entire motion picture on its foaming shoulders. The plot is a marvel of economy: dog bites bat, dog goes mad, dog besieges a mother and her son inside a Ford Pinto under a California sun that shows no mercy. Stephen King's novel is faithfully stripped of its more metaphysical flourishes. What remains is a sweaty, single-location siege picture, and it works, mostly, because Dee Wallace commits to the screaming and the dehydration with a sincerity that borders on the medical.

The cultural ledger here is remarkably clean. The cast is uniformly white and uniformly unconcerned with the fact. No character pauses to interrogate the racial order, the class order, or the environmental order. Joe Camber beats his wife and drinks too much, and the film presents this as weather instead of indictment. There is no sermon waiting at the end of the driveway. The horror is a dog, and the dog has no politics. A modern studio would find this unbearable.

Donna Trenton deserves a moment of acknowledgment. She fights the beast with a baseball bat, gets bitten for her trouble, and ultimately puts a bullet in its face while her son cooks in the back seat. This is competence, not commentary. She survives because the script requires a survivor, and the film frames her ordeal in the oldest tradition available: a woman in peril, menaced by nature, saved at last by her returning husband. Progressive readings will find little purchase. The dog is the villain, the sun is the accomplice, and the Pinto is simply a bad car.