There’s the end of the world movie, and then there’s his closely related brother, the post-apocalypse movie. They both bring us to a familiar world that has gone beyond critical mass, but post-apocalyptic cinema allows us to catch our breath and examine things on the fringe more carefully, without the frantic pacing of an impending doom. Here I will present to you two of my favorite post-apocalyptic films: 1975’s misogynistic Don Johnson spectacular, A Boy and His Dog, and the more pensive, breathtaking 1985 offering, The Quiet Earth.

First, A Boy and His Dog. Don Johnson is a good ol’ boy roaming the nuclear-blasted desert wasteland that now, in the year 2025, consumes the planet’s surface. His sole companion is a shaggy mutt named Blood with whom he shares an unexplained telepathic bond. Not only this, but Blood is a wise-cracking genius who can also track down the scent of a woman from a mile away. Women, you see, are rare commodities in this world, and Don Johnson’s sole interest is tracking them down and raping them.

After tracking down one particular broad, after some wonderfully 70’s pacing and meaningless nonsense is thrown in for filler, she leads our heroes to an underground bunker where everyone wears white-face clown make-up in a society that seems permanently bent on celebrating the bi-centennial. Also, Jason Robards is the leader of this topsy-turvy subterranean lair.

Eventually, the purity and innocence that this eerie place exudes melts into terror as some ominous conversations transpire between clown world council-members and Don Johnson. He finds himself bound and gagged in a sterile hospital room, where a catheter has been attached to his dick, and he’s being used as a sperm donor for a gaggle of giggling clown-brides.

He eventually escapes with Blood and that one slut who brought him down there in the first place, and the three of them make it to the surface world again. Blood, however, has been injured and lies on the verge of death. He needs food! There’s no way he’ll survive without sustenance. So they do the only logical thing… wait, I’m not going to spoil the ending. You’ll just have to see the movie to find out what happens! Check out the Youtubed trailer below, which fully expresses everything about this A Boy and His Dog that I have been unable to get across with mere words.

Then there’s The Quiet Earth, a New Zealand film about a man who wakes up one morning and discovers that everyone else has disappeared. Not just died, but simply vanished, leaving cars in the middle of the road, and airplanes to come crashing down from the sky.

For an extensive length of time, we watch this guy run through the whole gamut of emotion, eventually divulging into insanity (seen below in a woman’s slip, reverse-engineering a VCR) before coming back to his senses and accepting his situation. It is at that point that he encounters a couple of other survivors of this mysterious extinction.

The three of them try their best to figure out what has happened, with the aid of highly advanced mid-80s IBMs. Watch the wonderfully bizarre scene below, in which they encounter a hallucinatory “tremor” of the very effect that eradicated all life from the planet.

I will suggest not watching the full trailer for The Quiet Earth, as it gives far too much of the plot away. It’s definitely a film worth sitting through and allowing to unravel at the pace it presents itself. Check out both of these gems! They make for a sublime double feature.