“The year is 2024…”
A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food and sex, and they stumble into an underground society where the old society is preserved. The daughter of one of the leaders of the community seduces and lures him below, where the citizens have become unable to reproduce because of being underground so long. They use him for impregnation purposes, and then plan to be rid of him. -Ed Sutton
Here we have a movie where the chicks lay up with really thick foundation. Heh he. But, you know they really need to. It’s tough living in 2024.
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”).
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.
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”.
Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel post-apocalyptic Arizona. Besides scavenging for food and sex, this movie features old, terrible porn 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. - emma505013 May 2004
A Boy and His Dog is as surprising an effort that has ever come into the genre. It is a movie where imagination is pushed to its most cynical, rotten roots. It is a movie where a wealth of pitch black comedy awaits those who have no problem..
… with the repore between a slightly dim dude and a dog…
… a dog who seems to be part comic relief, part ‘get-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ voice of reason.
The Characters:
- Vic – Don Johnson! A solo who survives in the wastelands left after World War IV, he is constantly hunting for food and women.
- Blood – Highly intelligent and telepathic mutt who pals around with Vic, in addition he has radar.
- Quilla June – Brazen girl sent to lure Vic underground, though she wants to replace the ruling council by using the solo. Ends up as dog food.
- Mr. Craddock – Jason Robards! Senior member of the ruling council and a very dour man.
- Dr. Moore – Fairly boring member of the ruling council, though he has the best memory.
- Mez – Female member of the council, not a pretty sight when laughing.
- Gary, Richard, and Kenneth – Conspirators who follow Quilla’s lead, all three get their necks snapped.
- Michael – Powerful robot which looks like a huge country bumpkin, if one of the ruling council points at you the wrong way he snaps your neck. Disassembled by Vic, but it appears the council has an entire warehouse full of replacements.
- The Screamers – Apparently they are green glowing mutant elephants. (We do not see them, but they do glow green and sound like elephants.)
It should be way too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a piece of legitimate cinema, perhaps as some gonzo experiment that’s dug up by cultists for tongue-in-cheek purposes.
Yet, Jones’s film is, in its way, a weird landmark.
It’s a snapshot of a moment where the basic fronts of a 70s ‘exploitation’ flick (action, comedy, randomness of the 70s, nudity) are put through the perspective of a filmmaker with brains and talent to make it stick in your mind.
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. - jzappa
This is extremely low budget but not bad. The conversations between Vic and Blood are hilarious (and Blood’s face and movements totally match the dialogue).
I love the bit when Blood asks Vic to name the presidents (remember, this came out in 1975). He responds “Nixon, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy…” When they meet Quilla (about an hour in) the film falls apart. The sequences down under are, at first, scary but get quickly repetitious. But it leads up to a twist ending which is great.
This was issued in 1975 with a horribly exploitive ad campaign. It showed a woman lying down on the ground. You don’t see her face–just her body and all she’s wearing is a shirt and covering her breasts and other parts. Blood has a paw on her and a proud look on his face and Vic is standing beside him holding a gun! The implication is obvious and the rape aspect of this bothered a lot of people.
The Plot
Armageddon is a difficult thing to rationalize, lending itself to outlandish scenes of violence and debauchery. The idea of a pubescent Don Johnson wandering the lonely wastelands guided by an intelligent and telepathic dog is a new one on me, but for some reason it all fits. Particularly so when the pooch in question has a bottomless stomach and spouts an endless stream of acidic criticism at Don Johnson. (Often complaining about Vic’s libido. A dog complaining about a teenage boy’s libido, I love it!)
The two lead an idyllic life, scavenging for food and water in the desolate landscape, but sometimes Blood is able to sniff out a female companion for Vic. For some odd reason all the women are in hiding, other than a ravenous and horny Don Johnson hunting them I can’t imagine why.
Well he ends up following Quilla into an underground fallout shelter, there the last “civilized” remnants of society are carrying on tradition. Country fairs, ice cream, and prizes for the best canned goods in addition to trapping fertile males from the surface to impregnate the young women.
Before you start thinking this is not a bad deal let me explain. Vic is immobilized and his genitals attached to the equivalent of an electronic milking machine. (Aiiiieee!) In short succession the lucky brides are wed to him, presented with a bottle of special sauce, and sent on their way. Nearly incapacitated by blue balls the ferocious young man stages a retreat from the complex after being freed, taking Quilla with him. The first (And last might I add.) marital problem results when Vic discovers his faithful pooch waited outside the shelter’s entrance this entire time and is on the brink of starvation.
Zany and fun to watch on a rainy day, plus the girlfriend will never look at your faithful hound the same.
Things I learned from this movie:
- Dogs would make excellent history professors.
- Porn films used to suck, in a real bad way.
- Men are confused and a little put off by women who want sex.
- There is a fundamental difference between “hang” and “harangue.”
- A secret and powerful society of mimes inhabits the underground areas of our planet.
- Green plants grow nicely underground, even without artificial light.
- Interrogating a dog is pretty darn difficult.
- Nobody expects a crowbar in the middle of a bouquet.
- If a very large, but slow moving, man is trying to break your neck I suggest running away.
- Dogs make the worst puns.
Surely those who were looking for nothing more than what Hollywood usually delivers when they invoke the words "science fiction" were disappointed, because this movie resembles the usual horror or action film masquerading as sci-fi very little.
Its source material is a novella by Harlan Ellison, a writer who's recognized by many in the sci-fi community as a master on the same playing field of "psychological sci-fi" as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.
From Ellison we get a very dark tale about a strangely human dog and his boy. They live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where Phoenix Arizona used to be, and hunt women and food with the same predatory zeal. But when Vic (or as the dog calls him, Albert) is lured into a surreal society living in a large bomb shelter, their friendship is threatened and Vic is almost forced to become a sort of sexual machine for the good of the State.
Just to run through some of the aspects of the film that I enjoyed, I really liked Tim McIntire's voice work as the dog, perfectly crisp like a cranky old man. How exactly the dog knows so much or is able to speak to Vic is never really explained, but I think there's a clue in that Lou (Jason Robards, Jr.) believes that Vic has spoken to a dog he encounters in the shelter.
That, along with the "Committee's" seeming obsession with recounting facts and figures almanac-style, makes me believe that the dog actually came from the shelter. Perhaps he was sent there to "observe" Vic, as Lou tells him they have been doing for some time, and he rebelled against their control. Like all good sci-fi the idea is vaguely proposed but never explained.
Don Johnson did pretty good work here, I mean it doesn't strike you as all that impressive at first but when you think about the fact that he had to do so many scenes with just this dog as his co-star it's a pretty tough act to pull off as well as he did.
Susanne Benton was decent in her role as well. I loved when she tried to sweet-talk the dog, basically the same way that she treated Vic. Vic seems confused about her intentions all the way up to the end, which is excellent -- if he had figured her out completely then the ending would just feel mean-spirited instead of humorous.
As it is, it's as if Vic believes he's making a sacrifice but the dog knows better and turns it into a joke. By the way my girlfriend thought the last line was too tacky but I thought it was perfect, it gave narrative closure to the film as well as filling in those who might not have understood the scene with the campfire.
Honestly the only performance I wasn't crazy about was Jason Robards'. There's these great scenes he gets to play with Alvy Moore ("Green Acres") and Helene Winston (great laugh she's got... she didn't make a lot of movies but strangely enough just this week I saw her in Curtis Harrington's "The Killing Kind").
He just has no energy, I guess that's the way he wanted to do it but it's annoying how he kind of mumbles through the dialog and I just didn't feel that the dialog was supposed to be quite that casual.
Basically I just did not like the way he decided to play the character, I didn't think it was scary at all. His android assistant, like a twisted American Gothic, is pretty strange though.
Plus I never understood why everyone down there was wearing clown makeup. Was it the idea of the forced smile?
Anyway, I salute the film because I think it was a brave decision to make it as it is and not to try to turn it into a more conventional thing with romance or too much action. I think I can see some influence from this movie on George Miller's "Road Warrior" (though I was told that he claims he hadn't seen it), and definitely on "Slip Stream" with Mark Hamill from the 80s.
But this isn't really the kind of movie that was made to fall into place inside the pantheon of "sci-fi" anyway. It's a closer relative to "Electra-Glide in Blue" and other films of the early 70s that explored the bitter end of "hippie" idealism, the same trend that Hampton Fancher was trying to catch onto when he wrote his first drafts of the film that eventually became "Blade Runner."
Frankly I can't remember seeing another sci-fi film that is so close to the feel and ethos of the most transgressive and anti-establishment sci-fi of the 1960s.
- funkyfry
Stuff to watch out for:
- 1 min – You have to respect any film that starts off with nuclear war.
- 8 mins – That is Phoenix? I see that it has not changed much…
- 23 mins – Don Johnson apologizing to a dog ladies and gentlemen.
- 25 mins – Good dog! Hehehehe!
- 37 mins – Blood just managed to kill a full grown man who was armed with a rifle?
- 45 mins – Sort of a canine teleprompter…
- 46 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
- 71 mins – Now, will Vic eat that or wipe it on his clothing?
- 78 mins – The true colors of Quilla’s womanhood come to light.
- 79 mins – That is about fifty yards I guess, easy shot with a rifle…
Conclusion
Watch the movie. It’s a great romp into 1970’s science fiction. And, as such, perfect for a nice lazy afternoon, or a boring evening at home.
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