A Boy and His Dog / Apocalypse 2024 (1975) ***½
For this year’s installment of Movies Whose Times Have Come, let’s look at a film that was enormously influential in its own day, but has fallen deep into obscurity in the years since. A Boy and His Dog stands alongside Death Race 2000 as a source of inspiration for Mad Max and its sequels, seeming to become more important a touchstone with each successive film in that series. It looms behind most of the Italian We Have Seen the Future, and It Sucks movies, too, especially the ones that posit a technologically advanced but nevertheless dystopian society as an oasis of grim functionality amid the ruins. Ari Nesher drew so heavily upon this movie for his bewildering version of She that it came out bearing more resemblance to A Boy and His Dog than to anything actually written by H. Rider Haggard. And if you pay close attention, here are fainter echoes of this film to be heard in everything from Escape from New York to The Warriors to Glen A. Larson’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. But one thing nobody has borrowed from it, so far as I’ve seen, is the conceit behind the film’s curious title. 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!”
Wait— come to think of it, there’s another thing about A Boy and His Dog that I don’t believe I’ve seen anywhere else. The back story here assumes that people of the future would eventually come to recognize the decades-long geopolitical struggle between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as an official Third World War, even if it ends without the two superpowers ever firing a shot at each other directly. That makes the full-scale nuclear exchange between unidentified combatants that destroys all of human civilization over the course of five days in 2007 World War IV. Our distinctly un-heroic protagonist— a teenaged hoodlum whose birth name was apparently Albert, but who prefers to be called “Vic” (Don Johnson, from Revenge of the Stepford Wives and Django Unchained)— was a year old when the nukes flew, so he understandably doesn’t have too firm a grasp on anything that went on Before. It’s also perhaps understandable that Vic isn’t one of those “rebuild from the ashes” types that show up so often in these things, since he’s never personally experienced anything but post-apocalyptic savagery. Even so, it comes as quite a surprise to see that the lad spends his time just wandering around what used to be Phoenix, Arizona, looking for women to rape. (Like I said— distinctly un-heroic.) Evidently that makes him a “rover” according to the social taxonomy of 2024. Anyway, Vic is about as smart as the average parsnip, and has considerably worse judgment, so he wouldn’t last very long in competition with all the other rovers if left to his own devices. Fortunately he has Blood looking out for him. That would be the aforementioned telepathic sheepdog (voiced by Tim McIntyre). Blood’s existence is intriguingly never explained. Maybe he’s an atomic mutant; maybe the pre-apocalyptic 21st century saw a vogue for genetically engineered super-pets; or maybe dogs have always been telepathic, and Vic is the atomic mutant for being able to “hear” Blood’s brainwaves. Regardless, Blood can “smell” with ESP as well as his nose, and he uses that talent to detect human females upon whom his partner can force himself. In return, Blood gets pretty much what dogs have been getting from our species since they first threw in with us during the last ice age.
As you might imagine, the entertainment landscape of post-World War IV Arizona isn’t much more fertile or inviting than the literal landscape. Just the same, somebody occasionally manages to scrounge up an old 16mm projector and a few reels of film, and sets up a makeshift theater in a tent or a shanty somewhere. The really enterprising somebodies might even sell popcorn to go with the battered old movies! Vic and Blood are patronizing such an establishment one night (inevitably, they find themselves watching an artfully distressed print of director L.Q. Jones’s previous picture, The Devil’s Bedroom) when the sheepdog’s psychic snout picks up something most unexpected— one of the huddled-up rovers in the auditorium with them is a woman in disguise! After the show, the pair trail her to what they assume to be her hideout, where her choice of shelter suggests that this is, one way or another, no ordinary lady. Unless Blood’s nose deceives him, the mystery woman’s digs are also the lair of a pack of screamers. We’re left to ourselves to imagine exactly what screamers are, but they’re sufficiently bad news that Vic’s quarry would have to be either exceptionally rugged or exceptionally stupid to live among them. And once Vic actually meets Quilla June Holmes (Suzanne Benton, of Best Friends and The Last Horror Film), she turns out indeed to be exceptional in all sorts of ways. She’s remarkably healthy, pretty, and unmarred for one thing, almost as if she hadn’t spent her whole life tiptoeing down the knife-edge of survival. She has no more fear of Vic than she apparently has of screamers, either— and to the lad’s utter astonishment, he has no need to rape her. Quilla June is perfectly content to fuck Vic of her own free will, and indeed to do so over and over again until he’s thoroughly exhausted. The most startling thing about Quilla June, though, is what comes to light when Vic’s refractory periods put him in the unprecedented position of talking to a girl: the reason why she isn’t like anyone he’s ever met before is because she comes from Down Under.
No, that doesn’t mean Quilla June Holmes is Australian. In 2024, “Down Under” refers to a reclusive society little understood by people who don’t belong to it, dwelling deep beneath the Earth’s nuke-blighted surface. The inhabitants themselves call the place “Topeka.” Most of the folks upstairs recognize the entrances to the underground domain when they see one (they look like a cross between a tiny, futuristic pyramid and the topside bits of a 70’s Brutalist subway stop), but rarely has an inhabitant of the world above encountered anyone who actually lived there before. Quilla June never says what brought her up from Topeka in the first place, but she’s on her way home now, and she’d like Vic to come with her. Vic is certainly smitten with the girl from Down Under, but he prefers to think in terms of her staying up in Phoenix with him. Blood dismisses both ideas as stupid, and advises Vic to forget all about Quilla June now that he’s got what he wanted from her and then some. The need for sleep— especially urgent after a close-fought rover attack on the girl’s hideout sometime after midnight— overcomes all three disputants with the matter still unresolved. When Quilla June slips away while the other two are still in slumberland, Vic’s sole thought upon awakening is to track her to the nearest entry point to her world, and drag her back upstairs, nevermind what the dog says about extra mouths to feed or the risk of becoming targets for every rover pack in Arizona.
As it happens, though, the immediate danger facing Vic on his fool’s errand (on which Blood can’t join him, since quadrupeds can’t climb ladders) is something that never occurred to either boy or dog: the whole thing has been a setup. Quilla June was sent to the surface by the leaders of her community specifically to seduce Vic, whom their preliminary surveillance of Phoenix’s rover population identified as the likeliest local candidate to meet Topeka’s most pressing challenge. You see, it wasn’t the Fourth World War that drove Quilla June’s people from the surface of the Earth, but the first one; if I’m interpreting the oft-referenced date “Year of Our Lord One-Aught-Three” correctly, the subterranean refuge was established way back in 1921! After six generations with a small breeding population in an environment ill-suited to human health, the people Down Under are starting to experience a variety of biology problems, the most serious of which is a fertility crisis among the young men. They need some fresh genes down there, and so far as the Governing Committee’s spies could determine, Vic does little else but to spread his all over the place. Why not have him do it in Topeka instead? Indeed, even Vic himself likes the sound of that once he predictably falls into the hands of the Governing Committee, and hears the plan explained to him by Committee president Lou Craddock (Jason Robards, from Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Trial). He’ll like it rather less, though, once he experiences the distinctly Fordist means devised by Dr. Moore (Alvy Moore, who played comparably minor parts in The Invisible Boy and The Horror Show) to secure the mass impregnation of Topeka’s young women. Ironically, the big idiot’s best chance at rescue now is Quilla June herself, who finds that Committee member Mez Smith (Helene Winston, of The Witchmaker and The Killing Kind) has seen to it that entrapping Vic will not benefit the girl in anything like the way she was led to expect.
A Boy and His Dog was based on a novel of the same name by Harlan Ellison. Indeed, Ellison contributed substantially to the screenplay, although most of it was the work of director L.Q. Jones and an uncredited script-doctor by the name of Wayne Cruseturner. Jones and his collaborators collectively nailed Ellison’s signature trick of being nasty and funny, humanistic and cynical, puerile and thought-provoking, all at the same time. Look closely at Vic himself, and at the role he plays in the narrative, and I think you’ll see what I mean. Vic is a reckless, stupid, impulsive jerk— and those are his good qualities! His lifestyle is indistinguishable from those of his antagonists in and around Phoenix, and would mark him out as the villain in any normal post-apocalypse movie. And yet Don Johnson and L.Q. Jones treat him as if he were a basically sympathetic character. It’s therefore tempting to assume that they themselves found him sympathetic, which would say absolutely nothing good about either of them. But notice that by following Quilla June Down Under in unquestioning obedience to his cock, Vic lands himself a comeuppance that even Dante Alighieri would have applauded, once you finished explaining to him how an electric milking machine works. Ironic justice does not normally befall characters whose authors are on their side. And although Vic manages to escape his fitting fate, he does so only through the intervention of Quilla June Holmes— who steps in not out of any honest affection for the rape-happy dumbass, but because she isn’t through exploiting him yet for her own purposes. Similarly, although the pitch-black joke on which A Boy and His Dog ends can certainly be interpreted as the ultimate statement of the film’s misogyny, it also has the surprising effect of exposing Blood as no more moral a being than Vic or Quilla June or Lou Craddock, however wise the animal might be when it comes to survival under post-apocalyptic conditions. Indeed, I think that’s the underlying message of A Boy and His Dog in a nutshell: humanity might survive the sudden annihilation of all culture and civilization, but morality won’t. For all its off-kilter humor, then, this movie stakes out a much bleaker position than most of its more straight-faced cousins. And for all its edgy irreverence, it arguably takes a higher view of whatever hard-won goodness our species has attained, regarding it as something precious, fragile, and truly irreplaceable.
None of which is to say that A Boy and His Dog can’t just be fun, too. Topeka, for example, is a one-of-a-kind vision of dystopia, with its roaming marching bands banging out off-key Sousa anthems, its un-remarked-upon fashion for clownish face makeup, and its ubiquitous loudspeakers braying homilies of clean living from the Committee Almanac. It’s a mad inversion of Ray Bradbury’s idealized small-town Midwest, ruled by tinpot patriarchs and scheming schoolmarms, and policed by hayseed androids like something out of Westworld by way of “Hee-Haw.” If John Harvey Kellogg had the power of Immortan Joe, he might have built such a society from the ruins of our own. It’s a far cry, in other words, from the kind of science-fascist oligarchies that have been a mainstay of After the End movies since Things to Come in 1936. Tim McIntyre’s performance as the voice of Blood falls into this category, too. He imbues the psychic dog with the demeanor of an extremely patient middle school teacher coming to grips with his slowest and most willful student. At the same time, though, McIntyre makes Blood strangely convincing as a dog, demonstrating clearly at all times that his long-suffering tolerance of Vic’s invincible idiocy is rooted in a thoroughly canine selflessness and personal loyalty. And while I’m on the subject of Blood, let’s give due credit to Tiger the sheepdog, who might be the most talented actor in this picture. I’m fully prepared to believe the rumor that Jones abandoned his projected sequel, A Girl and Her Dog, at least partly because he learned that Tiger had died at some point since production wrapped on its predecessor. Still, I’m sure a lot of people will find A Boy and His Dog too disturbing in its main thrust to laugh along with it, even at its most lighthearted. But for those of us with sufficiently warped sensibilities, this movie is a hoot, even at its darkest.
Once again, for my first review of a new year, I write up an old sci-fi film purporting to tell me what to expect during the Earth's next circuit around the sun. Click the banner below to revisit how that went in previous years:
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