A Boy and His Dog

If you ignore the last five minutes (or like my friends, can't sit through the first 80-odd minutes) this movie is horrendous, a classic example of "Bad Science Fiction). My friends and I rented this movie in a quest to see the Worst Science Fiction Ever and it did not disappoint. Much like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, if you did not know it's cult status you'd probably hate it and the end scene is it's only redeeming value. It is a must see for anyone who wishes to be a sci-fi guru but to everyone else... Consider yourself warned!

I'm seen odd movies before. Strange films with quirky characters and bizarre plots and social commentary. Usually these are consistently intriguing, but somehow, "A Boy and His Dog" just didn't connect with me. I liked the banter between Don Johnson and his intellectual canine companion. I liked the idea of the two roaming the desolate landscape of a world after WWIV. I liked the roll call of presidents... "Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy..." I was still interested when they find the girl holed up in the screamer's lair, but it started to lose me with the "down under" society with all the folks on the committee with their white clown faces, and the robots named "Michael", and the... ahem... milking machine that Don Johnson was hooked up to. I mean, I understood what was going on, but it just didn't connect with me. Perhaps I missed the banter between Johnson and the dog in these scenes. I don't know. And the shocking ending? Well, you don't see anything, but through discussion you find out what happened, and given the context of the film and the character's behavior, I didn't think it was all that shocking. I admire that it was a low budget film going for a unique premise, but something is flawed about it that I just can't quite put my finger on.

Despite its ironically cutesy title ("A Boy and His Dog") and a plot premise that might've come out of the Walt Disney archives (dog and boy share telepathic communication), this movie is about as darkly comic and acidic as anything Stanley Kubrick ever did ("Clockwork Orange"). Sadly, as of the year 2014, almost 40 years later, the only copies you can find, even the laughable Blu-ray HD release, are in serious need of some restoration before audiences will give this film the respect it deserves. But considering its low profile appeal, I highly doubt that'll happen in our lifetimes, so grab it wherever you can. In the tradition of the great 70s dystopian/postapocalyptic scifis like "Clockwork Orange" (1971), "Rollerball" (1975), "THX-1138" (1971), "Soylent Green" (1973), "The Omega Man" (1971) and I'll even throw in "The Stepford Wives" (1975), this movie has its appeal in a sort of minimalist presentation that presents a chillingly emotionless and sterile future. Where "A Boy and His Dog" excels is in its thick, satirical tongue-in-cheek presentation, particularly in the 2nd half when our hero encounters the true future of human society (or is it the present? You be the judge). The first half is something like Mr. Ed meets Mad Max, with its equal portions of chatty humor and dusty violence. But right in the first scene we realize that, despite the cute banter between boy & dog, there aren't going to be many warm fuzzies. In the opening scene we learn that the boy (Don Johnson) is looking for female survivors so he can rape them. If you can swallow that highly disturbing premise, which the director makes no bones in presenting at the outset, then the rest should be an unsettlingly fun joyride all the way to the film's very memorable punchline. Things get really trippy in the 2nd half, and even though there's minimal nudity, certain things happen which would make D.H. Lawrence blush (particularly involving a certain mechanical device attached to the male anatomy). Definitely NOT a date movie, nor any sort of movie you'd watch with your parents or kids, "A Boy and His Dog" is really like a lost cousin of "A Clockwork Orange" or "Dr. Strangelove". Who ever would've thought that this sarcastic gem would come to light through the directing talents of L.Q. Jones, the ubiquitous guest star on many a 70s TV show like "Charlie's Angels", "Columbo", "Gunsmoke" and "Vega$" but whose only other directing credit is an episode of "The Incredible Hulk" (one which I'm going to re-watch immediately). Unfortunately with the somewhat bland & grainy video quality of the existing print, we don't get the full eye-boggling power of this film the way one could imagine it. But all the same, it's an unusual vision which should proudly take its place amongst the other 70s masterpieces I mentioned. You can buy the Blu-ray for literally pennies on ebay, so you have no excuse for not checking this out.

This movie is practically unwatchable. Save yourself some time and read the short story by Harlan Ellison of the same name. The short story is better. The movie suffers from terrible direction, starting with the annoying Technicolor bomb blasts flashed on the screen at the introduction. Mostly the movie is about bands of rapists who fight with each other. A young Don Johnson plays a "solo" (a rapist who wanders around by himself,) and he competes for victims with the "rovers" (bands of nasty boys.) The movie takes place in 2024, seventeen years after World War Four broke out (in 2007.) For some reason, everyone in the movie still has canned food and ammo and tobacco to smoke. Go figure. I guess the bombs didn't hit all the Wal-Marts or something. Oh, and did I mention that dogs can talk in the future? The movie is very poor at explaining this point; there are telepathic dogs who can communicate intelligently with human beings. This is the main premise of the movie and the motivation for the final scene, which the director totally fails to set up properly. The short story by Ellison explains it all better: Ellison mentions that government researchers were able to genetically engineer attack dogs to fight along-side future soldiers. The dogs have a "sixth sense" and can detect other living things, both human and animal. The dogs communicate this information telepathically to the human beings they work with, and in many cases they have a higher IQ! This explains why Vic is always having psychic chats with his shaggy dog "Blood", who corrects his grammar. Blood is a direct descendant of the military research dogs and is the best of his breed. The beginning scene is a gratuitous rape scene, derogatory towards women, and completely pointless. Perhaps the director just wants to show how nobody in the post-apocalyptic future has any morals. The protagonist "Vic" is upset that he doesn't get to rape anybody, so he goes to a * movie with his dog. His telepathic dog senses that one of the "Solos" in the audience is a woman dressed up as a man. Vic and Blood pursue the girl, and have a big fight scene in an abandoned YMCA with a local team of Rovers who also want to rape the girl. Vic "protects" her from the rape gang, and then gets it on with her in the boiler room of the YMCA basement. The girl is from a "Downunder" town. This is a small city built in an underground bomb shelter. She lures Vic to the downunder, where Vic is captured by weird people wearing white-face makeup. (This wasn't in the short story, it was purely an invention of the wacky director.) Jason Robards plays the mayor of the insane underground society, where the town council sentences people to "death by robot strangulation" if they have a bad attitude. The town mayor explains to Vic that for some reason, reproduction doesn't work underground and all the babies born are girls. They are trying a little breeding-experiment and they need someone from above ground (Vic) to be a stud for the town's ladyfolk. Vic decides that the whole town is just too crazy for him, and escapes with the girl. There is a robot chase scene that is notable for its comic absurdity. Anyway, at the end both Vic and the girl escape to the surface. However, Vic finds that his poor dog is hurt and hungry, so Vic murders the girl and feeds her to the dog. Apparently Vic loves his dog more than his new girlfriend. The ending of the book is identical to the short story, shocking and pointless.

I cannot state enough how horrible this movie was. If I were Don Johnson I would remove this credit from my resume. It was just plain awful. Within the first 10 minutes of this mess I knew I should leave. Unfortunately for me, the others I was with wanted to stay (I will NEVER forgive them!!). Don't waste your $3.50 rental fee.

This disorderly pre-Mad Max spree is one of the most entertaining post-apocalyptic future movies ever made. You know why? Because it has no taste and in that, it has no inhibitions about the questions it asked about what will happen after the world is spent by nuclear war. It asks about how procreation will happen, how basic sexual feelings will be satisfied, and other things. It has a genuinely original plot involving telepathic dogs that are more literate than their human masters,gunfights wherein the dogs direct their human masters, an entire society underground that discerns who is apart of them or not by wearing clownface at all times, and other crazy things. It's a wild, crazy, tasteless, sex-obsessed adventure that affords the viewer one of the greatest luxuries of the movies, one that is rarely completely fulfilled, which is unpredictability. It's so inventive in every way that you don't know what happens next. Even the comical theme song is so out of place for the genre of the film, but the theme of a boy and his dog makes it suitable. A Boy and His Dog is not a great film, but it's worth watching repeatedly and showing our friends. Another buried treasure.

I've read the short story. I've seen the movie. Both are equally horrible. Ellison states that the movie and the short story are different, but I say they aren't. Harlan Ellison equates knowing women in a non-raping capacity with civilization. Then proceeds to state that civilization is a horrible freedom killing state that must be avoided. Then he has his character kill and eat the woman for the sake of keeping his freedom and keeping the relationship with his dog. Thoroughly rejecting civilization and having non-violent sex with a woman. I am not PC. But I am a woman, and I don't like being raped. I don't like the idea that a relationship with me is a bad thing because it forces you to stop raping and killing. Furthermore, the movie does not give any reason why civilization is bad, other than repeating it like a mantra. It's juvenile rebellion and it is intellectually empty. This movie fails in production, fails in acting, it fails in intellectual stimulation. And on top of this it has a horrible horrible message that you cannot like if you own a *. This stops it from being even hilariously bad for me. I like men. I don't think that they are slavering rapists deep in their souls of souls. The reviews of this movie make me wonder, though.

The setting of this film is not only a material wasteland, but a moral one as well. Our protaganists are a wandering teenage misogynist and his super-intelligent telepathic dog. The latter helps the former to locate potential rape victims. Their pursuit of one particular sexual quarry leads the young man on a journey into a subterranean perversion of smalltown America. The dog is the most sympathetic character in the movie, and is brilliantly voiced by Tim McIntire. If you are able to wrap your head around the bizarre moral construct, this film is a nihilistic hoot.

Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel post-apocalyptic Arizona. Besides scavenging for food and sex, this movie features old, terrible * clips, evil Amish looking people with clown makeup and possibly the greatest pun in movie history. Blood provides hilarious commentary to all Vic's endeavors, his comments while Vic and a girl he finds have sex are particularly entertaining. At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

Like many artifacts of the 60s & 70s, y'hadda be there...at least in order to feel a protective fondness for what is without question a very flawed movie. The miracle of this film was that it was made AT ALL. (Due in no small part to the tenor of the times it sprang from. The shackles on pop culture and genre fiction were loosening, allowing for more serious themes and treatment; of course, two years later STAR WARS would tighten the shackles again.) I'm a little amazed at the many posters bitching about cheap sets, poor fx, etc. Does everyone watch a movie EXPECTING a 50-million-dollar budget and CGI up the wazoo? If so, we're in deeper trouble than I thought. I look at A BOY AND HIS DOG with great affection as a sincere attempt to do something different, provocative and heartfelt, and although it's informed by a naive leftist worldview I don't share, there's a great deal of audacious creativity at work here that transcends many of the budgetary limitations. You'd think oddities like this would be treasured as artifacts of a more open and experimental period in movie history, rather than derided for falling short of INDEPENDENCE DAY's store-bought bombast and opticals. Go figure...