A Boy and His Dog (1975)

A Boy and His Dog is a movie they use to play on veritable rotation on cable TV when I was a kid. Being that here, in the far-flung, futuristic year of 2023, I'm all awash and aflutter and aglow and melancholy, all at once, when I think about the late, great 1980s, I decided I must review this cinematic milestone in the evolution of desert-nomad post-apocalyptic fantasies about young, hot-headed dudes who can communicate telepathically with their animal companions. And, since it WAS penned by the late, great Harlan Ellison, who in the hell, I ask you, could resist?

The story goes something like this:

Vic (Don Johnson) and his dog Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire) are a duo that wanders the apocalyptic, Mad Max wastelands of the far-flung year of 2024. There has already been a nuclear war (everything is pretty much desert), and bands of "Rovers" rove in packs to find women and canned goods. Scavengers, scurvy dogs they are. It's not a nice place.

Vic is psychically connected to his cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and wise-cracking dog Blood, who calls him "Albert" for unspecified reasons (possibly just as a taunt), and Blood scouts out food for the hot-headed and horny young Vic, as well as women, who are victimized and traded-around like any other post-apocalyptic commodity. He spends time stealing from Mad Max-style loonies that prefigure the sorts of characters audiences would meet later in movies like The Road Warrior (1981).

Heading to a squatter camp, the boy and his dog pay to watch movies that look like cheap Times Square porno loops from the early Seventies, amid the wreckage and trash and detritus, and the ever-hungry Blood gets some popcorn for sniffing out a fair young damsel among them. Unbeknownst to the endearing, comic duo, though, they are being closely watched.

The girl (Susanne Benton) "Quilla," turns out to be a lure, and, after a gun battle with some "Screamers" (why they scream is never explained), Vic and Quilla proceed to go down, "Underground," to the mad, macabre, surrealistic underground city of "Topeka", ruled over by Jason Robards in white pancake make-up and a circle of rouge on each cheek.

Topeka is a sort-of send-up of early Twentieth Century small-town Thorntown Wilder American life if it was strained through the mental sieve of an Orwellian nightmare. Just getting down there it looks, at first, like a combination of a missile silo, bunker, and factory floor; that is, until you get to the "town", which is a black-roofed enclosed "sky," and some fake-looking trees and astroturf. There are also women in old-timey outfits, a marching band belting out John Philip Sousa, and a church wherein those that violate the rules or principles of "Topeka" are casually judged by Robards, who decides their method of death (euphemistically referred to as being sent "to the farm").

Everyone wears that same, damn white silent movie actor pancake makeup with the red rouge.

Seems they've lured the ever-horny Vic down there for a very special reason.

The movie ends with a black-humored quip from Blood, about how Quilla had "Marvellous judgment, if not particularly good taste." Harhar. The audience may sicken and groan when they realize what he is referring to.

A Boy and His Dog is an excellent picture, with an endearing relationship between devilishly handsome young Johnson and his world-weary, furry, and adorable companion. In the end, the audience realizes these two can't do without each other. Even in the far-flung, futuristic, post-apocalyptic Year of Our Lord, 2024.

(You find me a time machine and get me back to 1985 now. Madonna was way hot back then. But this movie was still a decade in the past.)