2024. Rather dim-witted and impetuous, but loyal teenage boy Vic (a sturdy and credible portrayal by a pre-fame Don Johnson) and his much smarter telepathic dog Blood (sharply voiced with fierce caustic aplomb by Tim McIntire, who also composed the folksy score) depend on each other to find food and females in a hostile post-apocalyptic wasteland. Complications ensue after Vic meets and falls for the seductive, yet conniving and deceitful Quilla June (a nicely charming performance by Susanne Benton),who convinces Vic to venture underground where a bizarre community that replicates vintage Topeka (!) require Vic's virility to impregnate their women.

Writer/director L.Q. Jones, adapting Harlan Ellison's classic novella, offers a truly odd, but ingenious and inspired blend of stark savagery and biting satire that has a marvelously off-kilter vibe which in turn gives this movie its own highly distinctive idiosyncratic identity. Moreover, Jones does a masterful job of creating and presenting a harsh and darkly amoral world populated by a rich assortment of nasty and grotesque people.

Without a doubt this film's key triumph is the often perversely funny and sometimes strangely moving central relationship between Vic and Blood that slyly subverts the special bond between a boy and his dog in which it's painfully clear that the more cunning and sarcastic canine is calling the shots for the subservient and stupidly impulsive kid (in essence, Blood's the brain to Vic's brawn). Jason Robards, Helene Winston, and Alvy Moore are wickedly amusing as the serenely strict committee who run the stifling subterranean conformist society, Ron Feinberg contributes a memorably ferocious turn as the brutish Fellini, and Tiger does excellent work as Blood. As for that infamous uncompromisingly nihilistic ending, let's just say that it packs one hell of a deliciously vicious punch. Wholly deserving of its stellar cult status.

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.

Damned if I know what gravitated LQ Jones to Harlan Ellison's novella of the title let alone to adapt it into a film. A veteran character actor, he's the one, for better or worse (for me the better),responsible for A Boy and His Dog, a story that takes place after World War 4, nevermind 3, where a young guy and his dog, whom he can understand ala Dr Doolittle, roams the desert fighting off wild savage men and looking for food and women. But there's more than just this premise- there's also the other side to this barren wasteland which, by the way, served as inspiration for the Mad Max series. There's also the "down under", where a society that's a cross between puritanical Kansas- dubbed Topeka- and a Fellini movie, is sterilized and needs fresh seed to repopulate its people. Where the ones living up above are brutal beings who can't give a damn about anything aside from what's next to eat or who's next to have their 'way' with (and the occasional projected porn movie),the ones below have created a f***ed up enclave where a robot bodyguard chokes anything in his path. Sounds, um... peachy keen, don't it?

A Boy and His Dog is as surprising an effort that has ever come into the genre, where imagination is pushed to its most cynical, rotten roots, where a wealth of pitch black comedy awaits those who have no problem with the repore between a slightly dim dude and a dog who seems to be part comic relief, part 'get-your-head-out-of-your-ass' voice of reason. Indeed, there could be something else read into all of this wackiness: if taking Freud into account, there's almost a super-ego aspect to the dog, where Vic (Don Johnson) only hears and talks with Blood (yes, a dog named Blood),who Vic trusts beyond all reason, while the boy himself is like a version of the Id, out for survival but also out for his carnal needs, no matter what the price. It's also very smart that Jones doesn't explain anything about the dog's abilities if it is meant to be that he and the dog can really talk to another. Damned if I would take a convoluted explanation anyway, all the funnier. In fact, Blood, as voiced with a perfect sardonic (yet also rather touching) style by Tim McIntire, is probably the character the audience can identify with, like the Neville/Sam bond in I Am Legend given a twist out of a Robert Crumb comic.

And all the while Jones makes this a future that looks lived in, a wasteland with leftover parts and clothes and production design full of boiler rooms and dark halls and places left untreated for years, AND in the 'down under' scenes a kind of plastic, small-town look that is probably even more eerie than the one up above. For what should be just an outrageous B-movie is a lot smarter than one would ever think looking at the premise. The dialog is invigorating in how it stays truthful while also aiming for the bizarre, and as with the most cringe-worthy of satire (i.e. the scenes with Jason Robards and the 'committee'),things said with a straight face and deadly serious always garner up huge laughs. Yet there's also an intelligence to the film-making as well. This could have looked cheaply made and shot poorly like many a B-movie, but Jones's DP John Arthur Morill gets some great, strange compositions out of this 'after'-world, sometimes spotting (better than average) Johnson give facial expressions like he knows what's going on but doesn't all the same.

It should be way too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a piece of legitimate cinema, as some gonzo experiment that's dug up by cultists for tongue-in-cheek purposes. But Jones's film is, in its way, a weird landmark, 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, as it presents its story through the prism of a society gone amock through two prisms, both hells in one way or another (though one, not too arguably, is a lot more fun than the other). Is it a Clockwork Orange or Blade Runner? Not quite. But I'd never kick it out of my collection, if only for one of the truly classic end lines of any movie, a bad pun that gives one more hysterical smack across the face.