!!WARNING: Contains major spoilers!!

The ever confrontational and challenging Harlan Ellison published his novella A Boy and His Dog in the April 1969 edition of the hugely influential British science fiction magazine New Worlds, then the de fact in-house publication of the “New Wave” movement. When it was first published in the States, in Ellison’s collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World that same year, a note announced that it “has been expanded for this, its first American publication.” It would prove to be a big hit in science fiction circles, taking home the 1970 Nebula for best novella and coming in second in the same category at the same year’s Hugos (it lost out to Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows) and led to a series of sequels and spin-offs.

In 1975 a film adaptation was released, made by the team behind The Witchmaker (1960) and The Brotherhood of Satan (1970). Former actor turned one-time director L.Q. Jones took over writing duties after Ellison started his own adaptation but ran into writer’s block, while Alvy Moore sat in the producer’s chair. The film stays fairly true to the novella but failed to click with cinemagoers and Ellison, ever the contrarian, either loved it or hated it depending on who you asked about it. It’s a film of two distinct halves with a coda that culminates in a terrible joke that has provided the film with more than its fair share of controversy ever since, a throwaway gag that Ellison himself hated, calling it “moronic, hateful chauvinist,” and saying that he despised it.

The first and better half is set in the blighted wastelands left behind by World War IV that lasted just five days. Vic (Don Johnson), a sex-crazed young man scours the deserts for food and women, assisted by his dog Blood who, thanks to having been experimented on by scientists, has lost his natural hunting instincts but is now telepathic (voiced by Tim McIntire) and can sense nearby women. Their relationship is fractious and based on mutual need, but there are moments of real affection between the two. Blood is erudite, sarcastic, world weary and repeatedly calls Vic “Albert” because he knows it annoys him and world weary, Vic an uncouth misogynist, driven more by his raging hormones than his brain. Together they eke out a living, dodging other survivors who have formed into marauder gangs, and hanging out in shanty towns watching pornographic films (Jones appears as an actor in one of the hilariously bad stag films).

Mid-way through, the film changes tack and becomes one of the oddest science fiction films of the 1970s, a decade already plentifully stocked on genre oddities. Somewhere beneath the desert is “Downunder”, a community seemingly straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, comprised of the survivors of the city of Topeka in Kansas (there’s surely a Wizard of Oz reference in there somewhere…) who wear outlandish make-up, deploy burly security robots named Michael (Hal Baylor) and which is dying out because of a fertility problem among the men. At first Vic is overjoyed to learn that Quilla June Holmes (Susanne Benton) has been sent to lure him into the subterranean world (without Blood who distrusts her and opts to remain on the surface), chosen to become their new breeding stock but is dismayed to find that his semen will be extracted by a machine and that sex is definitely off the menu.

With the help of Quilla June who is desperate to rebel against her father, Lou Craddock (Jason Robards), leader of the ruling Committee, Vic escapes back to the surface where he finds Blood close to death from injury and starvation. What’s a boy to do? With no food at hand, there seems to be only one solution, and as the film ends, Vic and Blood are seen wandering off into the desert with no sign of Quilla June and Blood delivering the divisive line “Well, I’d certainly say she had marvellous judgment, Albert, if not particularly good taste.” The implications are horrible… You can see why Ellison objected to that line in particular. His novella ended with the more optimistic exchange that begins with Vic asking “Do you know what love is?” and Blood telling him “Sure I know. A boy loves his dog.”

A curious oddity of the novella that’s held over here, albeit obliquely, is that it’s set in an alternate future (the year is given as 2024), the end point of a timeline in which John F. Kennedy not only survives but its re-elected. You only get a sense of this in the briefest of throwaway references when Blood is trying, futilely it seems, to educate Vic on the past and has him recite the names of the presidents of the United States. Jones has to be commended for keeping in a line that could just as easily have been eliminated with no great loss to the main story, for preserving, if only briefly, a strand of the original novella.

The title playfully suggests something more wholesome and family friendly than it really is, a grim joke on Ellison’s part. This may go some way to explaining why the film did so poorly at the box office in 1975, though it’s picked up a deserved cult following since. It has its faults – the momentum is derailed once we head underground – but there a lot to enjoy about A Boy and His Dog. One that found plenty to lie about it was Australian director George Miller, who took inspiration from A Boy and His Dog when he was making his Mad Max films, particularly Mad Max 2 (1981). Below ground, it becomes more surreal and Jones’ direction is less sure-footed, the pace flagging when it should have ramped up a gear. The above ground scenes are more interesting than the sometimes silly, sometimes dull Topeka scenes. Out in the open, given the background of the film’s two prime movers – as an actor Jones, was cast in many a Sam Peckinpah film, including the classic The Wild Bunch (1969) and Moore, also a former actor made his share of horse operas – that the above ground scenes play like a western.

But overall, the film is a creditable attempt to adapt a difficult novella. Vic is certainly an appalling misogynist which has left the film open to charges of sexism when in fact it does nothing to endear you to Vic or his rotten worldview. Blood is the real hero of the piece and his bickering relationship with the almost feral Vic is very funny, Blood undoubtedly being the master and Vic the pet. The film certainly isn’t an endorsement of Vic’s misogyny and Blood even scolds him on occasion for his obsessions and behaviour.

The film’s failure to set the box office alight put paid to plans for a second film, to be titled A Girl and Her Dog, which would have picked up from the final shot of the film and continued the story through the eyes of a female warrior named Spike. The film never happened but Ellison fleshed out the story for an abandoned television series to be titled Blood’s a Rover and he eventually wrote two more short stories set in the same world, Eggsucker in 1977 and Run, Spot, Run in 1980. Comic book spin-off Vic and Blood: The Chronicles of a Boy and His Dog (1987) continued the story and the whole tale was fixed up into the posthumous 2018 novel also titled Blood’s a Rover, Ellison having long suggested that the book was on its way. The final section of the book was written as a screenplay but so far, no one has has shown any interest in producing it.