You're so funny when you're sexually frustrated.
While I'm in a cult movie mood, I figured I'd follow Barbarella with another film set in the future (albeit a not so far-flung one). Set in 2024 in the aftermath of World War IV (a war which lasted all of five days), 1975's A Boy and His Dog was a movie I first encountered on the shelf at Pennington Video back when I was in college (and towns still had independent video stores). I was drawn to the cover art, which depicted a mushroom cloud with a smiley face on it, but put off by the presence of Don Johnson in the leading role. At the time I wasn't familiar with the work of Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original novella, or Sam Peckinpah regular L.Q. Jones, who wrote and directed and film version, so I never even brought it up as a candidate when my friends and I were searching for something to rent. It took Danny Peary's inclusion of it in Cult Movies 2 for me to give it a second thought and my library's recent acquisition of it to get me to sit down and watch it.
Okay, enough preamble. What about the film? Well, it's about a boy named Vic (Johnson) and his telepathic dog Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire and played by Tiger from The Brady Bunch) who roam a post-apocalyptic wasteland (identified as Phoenix, Arizona, which has been leveled along with every other major city in the world) foraging for canned food, avoiding the radioactive "screamers" and prowling for females for Johnson to rape. The division of labor is that Johnson finds the food and Blood locates the females, but there's plenty of competition in the form of roving bands of hooligans, so Johnson has had to go without for many weeks. That's probably why he ignores Blood's warnings when they stumble upon a beautiful girl (Susanne Benton) from "down under" and he insists on chasing after her instead of going with Blood to the fabled land "over the hill" (where food still grows in the ground, among other miraculous things).
After Johnson leaves Blood topside, he finds himself in a vast underground facility that is ruled over by an autocratic Committee chaired by none other than Jason Robards who, like everybody else there, wears clown-white makeup with rosy cheeks. Calling itself the State of Topeka, the community doesn't tolerate behavioral deviation of any kind -- especially the failure to obey authority -- and the Committee comes down hard on all rule-breakers, which would mean curtains for Johnson if they didn't have other plans for him. What those other plans are I'll leave you to discover for yourself. As rough around the edges as this film may be, I believe it is worth seeking out and definitely deserves its cult.