Screenhead

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Blu-ray?  It opens up a whole new vista of big and new titles to bring you because of their re-release.  And one of a long string of classics only recently re-released onto Blu-ray is the twenty fifth anniversary edition of the Stephen King classic,  Cujo.

Cujo, as most of us probably already know, but this is more for the benefit of a new generation of horror buffs in the making, is the story of a broken family with a lousy car.  The father is an advertising agent and the mother is a stay-at-home mom with a young son and a boyfriend on the side.  After the father goes off for an extended business trip following a disastrous ad campaign for a cereal featuring a red dye so powerful it showed up in body waste (and you can imagine the horror of noticing your toilet boil is filled with bright red liquid) , the mother and the young son take their other car in for needed repairs.  Of course, what no one bothered to mention is that a. no one is around at the repair shop and b. except for a gigantic rabid St. Bernard that’s already killed two people.

Yeah.  Imagine this mom’s position for a minute.  Stuck in a dead car with one of the CREEPIEST kids on earth (Danny Pintauro, who by the end looks like HE might well be the film’s villain by dint of looking like a walking corpse that frequently wails about his father) and Beethoven’s scary, bloody, mud-caked twin brother throwing himself at your car.

And indeed there’s plenty of harrowing here, but where the whole thing just kinda sorta collapses is in its ending.  Cujo’s ending doesn’t so much end as it does stop.  If you were to watch it, and there’s no reason not to, you’ll likely find the ending dissatisfying, but still, the whole thing leading up to it was pretty fair in its own right.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Cujo a fair-enough six out of ten, though it had some rough and disappointing spots, this is one dog who doesn’t need that many new tricks.

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