You can add this title to the list of Stephen King movie adaptations that have failed to ignite the screen. A rabid St Bernard traps spirited Dee Wallace and her son (Danny Pintauro) in a Ford Pinto and terrorises them for days in director Lewis Teague's predictable shocker, which sports a half-baked script and an altered, upbeat ending. The car siege should be a harrowing ordeal, but Teague barks up the wrong tree by focusing earlier on Pintauro's fear of the dark and subsequent phobic attacks. The suspense becomes laughably static, despite all the visual trickery thrown in to generate an interest that manifestly fails to materialise.

A friendly St. Bernard named "Cujo" contracts rabies and conducts a reign of terror on a small American town.