Year

Movie

Sneak Peek

I feel reasonably confident in claiming that After the Fall of New York is the only movie you’ll ever see in which an unconscious girl getting raped by an ape-mutant counts as a happy ending, or at least as the setup for one. Praise or condemn that as you like, but that’s the kind of picture we’re dealing with here.

The next we see of Maida, she’s become the property not of the Black One or any of his soldiers, but of a cruel gambler who is one of the few recognizable callbacks to the Old West that we’ll see in this movie. (I have no idea who plays the gambler, and that’s driving me crazy because I know I’ve seen him elsewhere.) This guy’s game is Russian roulette, which you wouldn’t think was the kind of thing it’s possible to be good at. We’re asked to believe that Maida’s new master is about the best that’s ever been, though, and we get to see a challenger paint the ceiling of a saloon with his brains to prove it.

The IPS helicopter drops Robbins in a jungle clearing, where he immediately comes face to face with the one thing he’s really afraid of— lots and lots and lots of rats. The rodents don’t harm him, but the noise attendant upon his headlong flight into the forest brings him to the attention of a band of his fellow inmates. Since the latter resemble a cross between a gang from The Warriors and a head-hunting tribe from an Italian cannibal movie, no one should be surprised that their attention is not at all something that Robbins wants.

In A Boy and His Dog, the familiar tropes of the hyper-competent animal companion and the wise old mentor are telescoped into a single character— an elderly, telepathic sheepdog who is explicitly the brains of the outfit. Combine that with a truly twisted sense of humor and a mood of ever-escalating sleaze, and it’s almost as if some maniac let David Friedman make an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney!”