text: It takes an eternity for this typically over-simplistic and idiotic Stephen King-based film to finally get out of the starting blocks. About half-an-hour is spent on needless introductions to various boring characters and their irrelevant little personal problems that might excite bored housewives and apathetic pensioners in soapy dramas, but this is supposed to be the horror genre (or so I naively thought). The mutt fails to look all that fearsome, which Leonard Maltin, the notoriously clueless/hopeless and always grinning film critic, would disagree with: he considers Cujo to be "genuinely frightening". (I often do have to wonder if Maltin is genuinely thick - or merely likes to do favors for his Hollywood friends...) It's both illogical and inconsistent the way Wallace survives an attack with only a leg injury. And, naturally, her car breaks down just when she needs it to save her life: this is one of the oldest horror-film clichés; trust King to use it to minimum effect. The premise is imbecilic, too banal, even for a horror film: a rabid mutt attacks a family. Is that it? This sort of thing barely constitutes a 3-minute sub-sub-plot in your average zombie film. I think even Cujo must have sensed that he was starring in a turkey. Mutts have terrible agents... But what I really don't understand is how people can actually throw themselves at the "Cujo" book and read it from cover to cover? These SK fans must be immortal: that's the only explanation, i.e. why they treat time as such a meaningless commodity.<br /><br />Bodycount: 3.