Recently Orion and director Lars Klevberg released their remake of Tom Holland and Don Mancini’s Child’s Play upon the masses. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but the film more than proved to all of us here at Movieweb that sometimes a horror flick remake can really hit the nail on the head. But today we have word via E.T. and The Howling actress Dee Wallace that she doesn’t think a remake of Stephen King’s Cujo would work. Not only that but the 70-year-old actress has no interest in seeing or taking part in any new version.
“There’s nothing more I could do with that part than I did. I went as far as I could go, as truthfully in that emotion as I could do it. And then they’d want to do the dog in CGI, which the fans [would not like].”
Along with her above-mentioned roles in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and Joe Dante’s The Howling, Dee Wallace obviously also starred in director Lewis Teague’s 1987 big screen adaptation of King’s classic killer dog novel Cujo. Now while I get why Wallace would not want to return to the physically taxing role of Donna Trenton in a remake of the Stephen King tale of Cujo, I have to say I disagree with her when it comes to a Cujo remake being a bad idea.
Stick with me here. The original movie was just as much about the horror of being trapped inside a small car without A/C in the boiling heat of a summer’s day as it was a flick about the horrors of a killer dog trying to bite you to death on the outside. What if a remake went the opposite direction in that regard and stuck a mother and her son in a stalled out Pinto without a heater during a freezing blizzard? After all, Saint Bernard’s are perhaps best known for their ability to survive in freezing temperatures. I think a winter-set Cujo remake could work.
Anyhow, along with Dee Wallace as Donna Trenton, Cujo starred Danny Pintauro as Tad Trenton, Daniel Hugh-Kelly as Vic Trenton, and Christopher Stone as Steve Kemp. Ed Lauter joined them as Joe Camber, along with Kaiulani Lee as Charity Camber, Billy Jacoby as Brett Camber, Mills Watson as Gary Pervier, Jerry Hardin as Masen, Sandy Ward as Sheriff George Bannerman, Arthur Rosenberg as Roger Breakstone, and a puppy named Moe as the titular Cujo.
Related: Stephen King Wins Back Rights to Some of His Biggest Horror Titles
Cat’s Eye and The Jewel of the Nile director Lewis Teague helmed Cujo from a screenplay written by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier based on the novel by Stephen King. Robert Singer and Daniel H. Blatt produced the big screen adaptation which featured music by Charles Bernstein, cinematography by future Speed and Twister director Jan de Bont, and editing by Neil Travis. Taft Entertainment and Sunn Classic Pictures were the production companies behind the movie which was distributed into a theater near your parents for date night by Warner Bros. on August 12, 1983. The $8 million movie was a hit scoring a total of $21.2 million at the box-office. This story comes to us via We Got This Covered.
