Cujo

 It's always been a bit weird to me how people complain about Stephen King movie adaptations. There's been a few turkeys among them, sure - and the man himself is responsible for Maximum Overdrive. But their overall quality is still pretty damn high: The Shining, obviously, but also Christine, The Dead Zone, The Mangler (I'm willing to fight over this!), Carrie, The Mist, Stand By Me and a few more. That's one hell of a bunch of movies right there; Let's see John Grisham or Nicholas Sparks beat that.

 Cujo is not a movie that comes up often when King's movies are discussed, but I've always thought it's one of the good ones. It's the rare Stephen King adaptation that tries to show as much love as the author does for his characters, and that pays off beautifully once the domino chain of events results in a lady and her young child getting isolated and trapped in their car, under siege by a murderous Saint Bernard.

 The film takes its time to get there. First you need to know who that's gonna happen to, and why. Or how, at least. The setup takes up almost two thirds of the movie, and the script (by Don Carlos Dunaway and Barbara Turner) takes special care in showing how all the pieces are set so that they'll fall just so.
 Cujo himself gets infected with rabies in the first scene, a bonkers sequence that follows a dog chasing a rabbit down a field into a very nice-looking burrow full of rabid bats; A whole complex, beautiful set built just for that. Lewis Teague, along with cinematographer Jan de Bont, go above and beyond in making a lot of scenes look incredible and very distinct - even ones like this one, which arguably only fulfills a minor role in the story. It's a surprisingly great-looking film.

 Then there's the Trentons, of which the Mrs. (Dee Wallace) and the Jr. (Danny Pintauro) are scheduled to be terrorized by the giant rabid canine. They have their own issues; Donna's been having an affair with family friend Steve (Christopher Stone), and her husband Daniel (Daniel Hugh Kelly) is starting to suspect. Their marriage isn't in a great place, as you'd expect, but little Tad - about whom both are crazy - keeps them together.
 If it sounds a bit soap-opera-ish... well, it kid of is, but it's well-handled, taking a page from King's naturalistic dialog, and ably aided by some beautifully understated work from the actors (particularly Dee Wallace). Pintauro is also incredible, giving a ridiculously good and very realistic child performance.

 The important thing is that it all feeds into the story. The fight, along with a crisis at Daniel's advertising firm, conspires to keep them separated, and the particulars of their situation leave Donna driving a barely functioning Ford Pinto up to a mechanic just outside town. The mechanic (Ed Lauter) and his family situation is yet another story thread that the film duly picks up on - an important one, because said family own one soon-to-be man-eating (times three) St. Bernard.

 There's a bleak inevitability to how things play out, along with some sharp gallows humour. In the book there's an inchoate evil spirit who's implied to be setting up the situation, but the movie ignores all that (though it left in Tad's night terrors and fear of monsters), and it's probably all the better for it.
 What the film does lose is the characters' inner dialogue, especially for Cujo, whose point-of-view chapters were heartbreaking in the book. The movie does an admirable job conveying some of it, but it's not the same. It's also a bit jarring to cut away from Donna and Tad's struggle for survival to drop in on Daniel eating lobster with a colleague. It all ties into the story, and generates some suspense, , but it still feels a little too drawn out for its own good.
 I'm also not a fan of Charles Bernstein's score. Reeds make me drowsy.

 Lewis Teague had directed one of the best 80's creature features in Alligator, so it's no surprise that he excels at the actual monster/dog attacks. There are a couple shots were Cujo is a little unconvincing (including one instance of it wagging its tail as it prepares to rip someone's throat out), but on the main it's fine, and where it counts - where the dog is mauling people or trying to dismantle the car to get at poor Donna and Tad - it's all very effective.

 All the more effective because of all the groundwork the film painstakingly laid out in the previous hour. They're fleshed out, flawed, likeable characters stuck in a horrible but also fully fleshed out situation.
 This Stephen King guy might be on to something.