A Boy and His Dog (1975, USA)

This was one of those really, really strange films that I saw in high school or perhaps earlier, at the recommendation of my father. Yep, I grew up in a really interesting family. In any case, I remembered only snippets of A Boy and His Dog, but reading Brian Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man recalled it for me – it must be the post-apocalyptic wasteland and callow young heroes that the two narratives share, though I must admit that beyond their relative youth and unflappable (almost) romantic pursuits, Vic and Yorick don’t really have much in common.

A Boy and His Dog takes place in the U.S., or what’s left of it, in 2025, not long after World War IV. Vic (a very young Don Johnson) and his sole companion, a psychic dog named Blood, roam the wasteland that was once Phoenix (no irony intended, I’m sure), searching for food and female companionship, though not always in that order. After meeting a suspiciously lovely young girl, Vic is convinced into following her home, a place far different than the kill-or-be-killed environment that he and Blood inhabit. Or is it?

That’s when things get kind of awesome. The vision of Americana that Harlan Ellison and L.Q. Jones dream up is pretty incredible, and in some scary ways, not entirely unbelievable. (Especially under our current Presidential administration. Maybe all those Kennedys wouldn’t have been so bad.) In any case, with the recent resurgence in post-apocalyptic fiction such as Y and The Road, A Boy and His Dog is most certainly worth a look, particularly for its tongue-in-cheek take on Cold War paranoia and the comically bleak view of what happens to humanity after the (at the time) inevitable happens.