On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult classic actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: No Food? No Females? No Shit.
There’s a feminist interpretation of “A Boy and His Dog” lurking somewhere inside this divisive black comedy from 1975. But I might be just a little too depressed to find it.
No worries! We can still flop on the couch, stream it for free, and let the maybe-misunderstood, anti-fascist cult classic — about a brutish scavenger named Vic (Don Johnson) and his psychic dog named Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire) — smother us both like a hug in a heatwave.
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This summer in the U.S. has been hard. Not “roam a post-apocalyptic wasteland searching for humanity” hard, but challenging all the same. 50 years ago, actor L.Q. Jones raised $400,000 to direct an adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog.” It’s a twisted collection of stories about an authoritarian regime combining elements of the buddy adventure with a fiercely perverse and yet staunchly anti-sex nightmare. Jones had trouble getting support from studios back then, but the project’s themes feel fresh now.
“Eisenhower… Truman… Kennedy…”
We meet Vic and Blood ambling through the desert. It’s 2024 A.D. but Brat Summer is nowhere in sight. The companions rely on each other in a world consumed by conspiracy, corruption, and nuclear panic. Bandits, raiders, and more monsters crawl the barren landscape. Charismatic psychos on chariots instantly give away “A Boy and His Dog” as inspiration for “Mad Max” (George Miller has said as much) — but the role it played in shaping the backwards Americana of “Fallout” shines even brighter.
“Johnson… Nixon… Ford… Kennedy… Kennedy… Kennedy…”
Quizzed by his canine companion, Vic recites former U.S. presidents to recall their country’s sordid history. From 1950 to 1983, World War III lasted decades, but World War IV ended in a matter of days? Yikes. Born in the real 2006, Vic would’ve entered an America launching Twitter, discovering Taylor Swift, transporting Saddam Hussein, and reclassifying Pluto as a dwarf planet.
But here? Here, he’s an evil 18-year-old facing a hopeless future in a cesspool formerly known as Phoenix, Arizona. (He would have voted for Trump either way — but one sounds better than the other.)
The deal between dog and deadbeat? Vic feeds Blood and Blood sniffs out women for Vic to rape. “No Food. No Females.” That’s the arrangement. It’s a sickening setup but the filmmaker isn’t shy. Jangly keys play under the title card setting up a bizarre collision that feels like a kind of complicit intimacy.
“You’re not a nice person, Albert,” Blood chides. He’s sardonic amid the sexual violence. “You’re not a nice person at all.”
He’s mocking Vic with a literary reference, although that isn’t clear in the movie. As Ellison explains in the novella, Albert Payson Terhune was famous for writing feel-good books about his beloved collies. “A Boy and His Dog” sees Blood repeatedly punish Vic for his friendship in a semi-antagonistic relationship that feels toxically male and codependent in a “Wilfred” way. Blood is smarter than his human, but their power struggle is punctuated with frat boy insults, like “fuzzy butt” and “dog meat,” on both sides.
Enter Quilla June (Susanne Benton). She’s a beautiful woman who wins Vic’s heart in the middle of a would-be attack. He beams, “I’m the one who’s supposed to want to do it!” — a political parallel so on the nose of the current culture wars it might as well be the face mask on a science denier’s chin.
Will Quilla finally drive Blood and Vic apart? Or will “A Boy and His Dog” escape the tyranny of a [gasp] horny human woman alive?! Sink into the bad summer vibes and find out on Tubi. (Yeah, yeah, it’s owned by Fox, but the service free. So, free pass for everyone. I’m not dealing with that either.)
“A Boy and His Dog” is now streaming on Tubi.
The Bite: Is That the Pernicious Normalization of Violence Against Women — or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
Check back in a feature length. Are you watching “A Boy and His Dog”?
IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations late-night on weekends. Read more of our deranged recommendations and filmmaker interviews…
