A Boy and His Dog

A Boy and His Dog, screening today at the River Oaks Theatre, is a post-apocalyptic scenario that could have only come from self-proclaimed “most contentious person on earth” Harlan Ellison. For those of you who aren’t sci-fi geeks, Ellison is a writer extraordinaire. His résumé includes writing gigs for the original The Outer Limits and Star Trek television series (he was fired on his first day at Disney for making a joke about putting their signature characters in animated porn), and hundreds of short stories and articles.

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More About

• Harlan Ellison
• The Outer Limits (TV Show)
• Tim McIntire
• Pets
• Dogs

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Ellison, whose work is quite dark and clever if you can stomach his personality, wrote A Boy and His Dog as a short story. Director L.Q. Jones expanded it into the 1975 film about Vic (Don Johnson), a forager in a nuclear wasteland, and his bio-engineered telepathic dog Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire). Sex is more important than food or weapons to the crude Vic, and the smart-assed Blood helps him find women to, well, rape, until the two find an underground society, deceivingly made up to look like a suburban ‘50s utopia, populated by women who want to violate Vic in a most poetically just way.

An Axl Rose of the sci-fi sect, the abrasive and complex Ellison is hard to appreciate without wading far into geekdom. A Boy and His Dog is the easiest way for laymen to sample his style, even if it does make Dr. Strangelove seem sweet and optimistic. 11:55 p.m. Friday and Saturday. 2009 West Gray. For tickets and information, call 713-866-8881 or visit www.landmarktheatres.com. $8.25.
Fri., March 14, 11:55 p.m.; Sat., March 15, 11:55 p.m., 2008