Fuck You, Dog.

A hard-R-rated horror movie topped the box office this weekend. The EVIL DEAD remake is way better than it *should* be; one of the bloodiest movies I've ever seen. And the box office is terrific evidence for why horror movies should be rated R. In honor of that:

Revisited the 1983 Stephen King adaptation CUJO over the weekend. I remember watching this on cable with my family as a child and it scared the living shit out of me.

Of course, it's a very different film to watch as an adult. As a child, I identified with the terrorized child. As an adult, I see a marriage torn apart by casual adultery; a newly alone mother trying to protect her child from the horror battering against her car door. Dee Wallace from E.T., once again playing the single mother archetype. The 1980s was such a great decade for divorce movies.

Lewis Teague's direction is refreshingly clean and simple, in hindsight. While most movies today seem to buckle under the burden of trying to be visually innovative, CUJO is more straight-forward.

The script... could use some tweaking. The adultery elements don't quite ring true enough. There's a larger problem with the underlying premise because most people do NOT want to see a dog get killed. Even a monstrous dog with bat-rabies who's mauling people. And if you're making CUJO, you have to kill that fucking dog by the end. He's more than a dog, he's a force of nature that this woman has to wage war with. A force of nature she has to defeat in order to earn her son.

In any case, I made this animated GIF for the internet.