A Boy and His Dog

Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel post-apocalyptic Arizona. Besides scavenging for food and sex, this movie features old, terrible porn clips, evil Amish looking people with clown makeup and possibly the greatest pun in movie history. Blood provides hilarious commentary to all Vic's endeavors, his comments while Vic and a girl he finds have sex are particularly entertaining. At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

Here's a ridiculous movie that never aspires, so it wallows in self-pity.

The best way to describe this is an unimaginative version of 'Mad Max' and '1984'. Sadly, this doesn't break any new ground for our imagination. The only novel element is the talking dog which, by now, isn't amazing aside from his 'Lethal Weapon'-esque conversations with Don Johnson.

Final Analysis = = Cinematic Dud

In the year 2024 Earth has become a barren desert due to WW4. Vic is a solo, a loner who walks around in search of food and sex. He is accompanied by his telepathic dog, Blood, who uses his senses to sniff out women and food. When Blood sniffs out Susanne it leads to a terrifying journey to the underground where Vic finds himself trapped for sinister means.

This is a very basic that sticks to post-apocalypse movie rules - desert conditions, everyone searching for basic needs, loner warrior etc. The story seems to be leading nowhere but then picks up on the story of Susanne and begins treading towards the underground scenes. The main driver of the first half of the film is the relationship between Vic and Blood. Once the film moves underground, Blood is left behind and the film stutters a bit because of him being out of it. However once the story picks up again, Johnson can almost carry it. And the ending - it's not a shock or a twist but it's a quite whimsical end in a story that is about friendship.

Johnson is not too bad here, he's slagged off on these pages, but considering he's acting to a dog he does really well. It's almost like acting in a blue screen I suppose, having to respond to lines that aren't being spoken. He shows the extent of his talents when he goes underground but he's good on the surface. Composer Tim McIntire is good as Blood, but maybe makes him a little too unlikeable early on. The only other performance of interest is Jason Robards as the head of the underground committee.

Overall this is a little oddity, but it's not a brilliant film. The underground scenes are good in that they display greater imagination than those on the surface. It lacks pace for the most and really doesn't have anything to say but it's an interesting film.

More than anything else, I think this is one of those films that movie-snobs talk about in pubs because they know few people will have seen it! Forget them - it's worth seeing once.

First off... To the guy who said that this movie doesn't say anything.. Please try to use more than 1 percent of your brain cells next time you analyze a movie. To those who think that the writer of this story, Harlan Ellison, intended on being anti woman in his creation of the final scene, you need to re-examine the story's real meaning. The movie (and especially the original story) is making a strong statement about the meaning of love. Love is honest. Love is survival. Vic probably makes the most mature decision in his entire life by choosing the dog over the woman. He needed to choose the dog over all else in order to have a future in that harshest of all worlds. He chooses life over temporary sexual pleasure. Vic was never in love with Quilla June. In the world of "A Boy and His Dog" a Vic and Quilla June relationship was destined to fail for many obvious reasons.

Nevertheless, the original story does a much better job of exploring Vic's ambivalence in making the final decision. It is true that Ellison's original novella is a masterpiece. Thanks for listening.

This was fairly funny and well written, in a writerly sense, but what was supposed to be the emotional turn at the end didn't land for me because of the scripts, the movies, woman problem.

So World War III just happened and the world's population and society as a whole were decimated, not to mention the fact that there aren't many women around to have sex with. And that's were Don Johnson comes in, or doesn't come in. With the help of his trusty dog, who he plies with food, he goes around looking for a woman to bang. He eventually finds one...and that leads to some unexpected consequences.

Don Johnson is good in his seedy main role, and the dog steals the show. It has some novel scenes and fresh interplay between the Don and the Dog. Overall, the movie is witty and has some fun moments...but that's where the good words end...

You can't have your lead character treat woman as only sex objects and then ask me to believe that he had any sort of relationship with the main female character. I didn't buy for a second that the girl had any emotional investment in him, nor did I believe that he ever saw her as anything more than a pin cushion, as nothing he did spoke to the contrary. So the notion that his relationship with his dog in any way grew thanks to the "relationship" with the woman was asinine.

That brings me to what this movie was really about. An exercise in woman hating...and ultimately, that they're beneath dogs (and if you've seen the movie, you know what I mean).

Other than that, there wasn't much else doing in this movie. It had a very small cast and very thin plot. The theme, as it were, sucked. It didn't work and along with the treatment of women sucked, there goes that word again, most of the enjoyment out of what was otherwise a decent little character driven post apocalyptic sci-fi movie.

I've nothing against cruel and mean spirited movies, even if they aren't witty like this film is, as long as they have something to say. This film has nothing worthwhile to say, nothing defensible to argue for. It's just misogynist lit porn brought to film.