A Boy and His Dog - 1975

I don't remember why I rented this.  I think it was a sudden feeling of "why the hell haven't I actually sat through this extremely well known sci fi film, when after all I write a goddamn movies blog?!"  And with those thoughts I rented it from the library.  Libraries man, they're coming back.

I've seen this movie before, let's start there.  The whole story is that I've seen this, as a kid, and several times (probably) since then.  But, I remember nothing from it as a kid, and as an adult, my memories are from at least ten years ago, when I put it on and never made it more than half way.  In fact, I think I even tried to watch this once or twice and stopped.  And why?

This is not any more hard to watch than anything else on this blog.  In fact, it's right up my (current) alley, which is to say it's 70's, culty, and written by wonky novelist Harlan Ellison.  To be honest, I'm not sure as to why I never finished this one.  I think I was just not in the right mood those other times.

Admittedly, this movie is all over the place both stylistically and thematically, that and they really seem to have a mission to push away and fuck with their audience, taking their audience into both sexual and disgusting places, taking it all with slabs of black comedy, having dumb elements of humor and fantastic, whimsical parts as well.  This is the type of comedy that was for adults but was equally for kids, as much the type of film the teens would like as would the kids they babysat for.  This type of thing, in other words, again something that's relatively gone now.

In the beginning, we see loner Vic wandering the wasteland with his faithful, telepathic dog companion.  And wait a minute, what?  Already, a few minutes in we have an unexplained telepathic dog.  Moments later, we learn that sex and rape are the main goal for our supposed hero.  Man, are we off to a good start or what?  They roam around presumably raping chicks, but so is everyone else who've been doing this since World War 3, which destroyed everything in 4 days.

The movie only gets weirder from there folks.  Soon there's a secret underground society in makeup, soon there's forced ejaculation, real dogs fights back when they'd blatantly hurt animals on film, and lots more!  This is one for the books.  And yes, it's definitely uneven.  There's great parts, thrilling and compelling parts.  There's also awfully self-aware, weird and uneven parts.  There's not as much laughs or action or anything as there should've been, and rather we're left "just kinda waiting" longer than anyone ever would want to, but this is still a wacky ride I should've taken before.

A Boy and His Dog is one of those movies that could easily be built up.  When you mention everything taking place, one is ready for a true WTF rollercoaster.  But, if someone went into this with no anticipation, would probably be very pleasantly surprised.  3.5 stars.

Side note:  Just love to track the years where these "futuristic thrillers" take place.  This one is 2024, so we got 5 years to make the world end up this way.  Get on it, guys.