The film's storyline concerns a teenage boy, Vic, and his telepathic dog, Blood, who work together as a team in order to survive in the dangerous post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Southwestern United States.

Vic is most concerned with food and sex; having lost his parents, he has no formal education and does not understand ethics or morality.

Blood wishes to find the legendary promised land of "Over the Hill" where above-ground utopias are said to exist, though Vic believes that they must make the best of what they have.

That evening, while watching old vintage stag films at a local outdoor "cinema", Blood claims to smell a woman, and the pair track her to a large underground warehouse.

There, Vic attempts to rape Quilla June Holmes, a scheming and seductive teenage girl from Downunder, a society in a large underground settlement.

Unknown to the pair, Quilla June's father, Lou Craddock, had sent her above ground to "recruit" surface dwellers.

When Vic is told that he has been brought to Topeka to help fertilize the female population, he is elated to learn of his "stud" value.

His joy is short-lived, when he is informed that Topeka meets its need for exogamous reproduction by electroejaculation and artificial insemination, which will deny him the sexual pleasure that he had envisioned.

Quilla June helps Vic escape only because she wants him to kill the Committee members and destroy their android enforcer, Michael, so that she can usurp their power.

Off-camera, Vic murders Quilla June and cooks her flesh so that Blood can eat and survive.

[8] Eventually, after going through approximately 600 auditions, they settled on Tim McIntire, a veteran voice actor who also did most of the music for the film.

The site's consensus states: "An offbeat, eccentric black comedy, A Boy and His Dog features strong dialogue and an oddball vision of the future".

[11] Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote that the realistic world set up in the beginning and the underground community introduced later "don't really work together; their contrast, and a ridiculous ending, shatter the picture.

[12] Variety called the film "a turkey" and "an amateurish blend of redneck humor, chaotic fight scenes, and dimwitted philosophizing".

[13] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 1.5 stars out of 4 and wrote: "Rather than illuminate the present through a glance at a possible future, 'A Boy and His Dog' is simply a dim-witted collection of tired sex gags and anti-American imagery".

[19][20] The film was controversial for alleged misogyny; the script included lines that were not in Ellison's original stories and that authors such as Joanna Russ, in her essay "A Boy and his Dog: The final solution," found to be objectionable.

It was a few days after he brought up his problems, mostly concerning the way Blood talked about the girl during the locker room scene when they first meet.

Jones states that he had started to write a script sequel to the film that would have picked up where the first film ended and featured a female warrior named Spike, and we would have seen this world through the eyes of a female instead of a male (this happens in Ellison's story, Blood's a Rover, when Blood partners with Spike after the ostensible death of Vic).

Blood's a Rover by Harlan Ellison, a "fix-up" novel, consisting of "Eggsucker" and "Run Spot, Run", two short stories from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as "A Boy and His Dog" (Ellison's novella) and an unproduced teleplay from the 1970s, "Blood's a Rover", was published in a limited number of hardcovers.