The Dog from A Boy And His Dog

This movie, based on a story by Harlan Ellison, contains a heartwarming relationship between 18-year-old Vic (Don Johnson) and his telepathic, super-intelligent dog Blood. It's just like Peabody the time-traveling professor dog in those cartoons — except that Blood helps Vic find women to rape and food to eat. At the end of the movie, Vic has to choose between the love of a (not terribly) nice woman and keeping Blood from starving — and a shot of meat roasting while Blood talks about how the woman didn't have such great taste gives you a hint of what Vic chooses.

Wall-E

Okay sure, you expect robots to survive the death of the planet — it's what robots do. But you might not expect there to be only one robot left on an otherwise desolate world — and for it to be a cute trash-compacting bot that befriends a cockroach and is obsessed with Barbra Streisand. Admit it — you didn't see that one coming.

Pets, generally

Check out this amazing clip from Exterminators: After The Year 3000, the film with the best title ever. Scroll forward to around 1:00 in — the cute kid in the convoy fleeing from the evil punk-rockers has his pet hamster with him! It's the amazing post-apocalyptic survival hamster. A lion survives in Twelve Monkeys. There's also a lion, as well as Kevin Costner's mule, in The Postman. And the tough post-apocalyptic hunter Harry in the movie Hard Knuckle has a little rat dog in his front pocket, sort of like a post-apocalyptic purse dog. (See awesome picture at the link.) Why is there always a lovable pet after a disaster has wiped out most of humanity?

Kids, generally.

As random dissheveled guy points out in this clip from the upcoming The Road, you don't really expect to see kids surviving a disaster that kills most of the adults. And yet, lots of them do somehow. Including the kid narrator in Mad Max, the gang of children in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Newt in Aliens, and Ed in Cowboy Bebop. Thanks to Madeline Ashby and JungleMonkey on Twitter for suggesting this one!

The mall girls in Night Of The Comet

The deadly radiation from the red comet passing over the Earth wipes out everybody — except for Sam and Regina, two valley girls, who just want to have fun. And go shopping, at the mall, even if it's full of zombies. (It's a well known fact that zombies love shopping malls.) Thanks to Misty S. and S.J. Edwards for suggesting this film!

The Book Of Dave by Will Self

Dave is an obnoxious, mentally ill cab driver in London, who scribbles in his notebook about the rules for surviving London traffic and his hatred of his ex-wife, who's keeping him from having custody of his son. He buries his book, and 500 years later, it's dug up after a flood destroys everything. And it becomes the foundation of a whole new misogynistic religion based on this crazy guy's ramblings. There have been plenty of other stories about bits of cultural flotsam surviving after everything else is gone — Mickey Mouse does it quite often — but this may be the weirdest.

Dinosaurs in Yor, The Hunter From The Future

You have to admit, you didn't expect dinosaurs to survive after the human race was all but wiped out, did you? Just like Planet of the Apes, Yor features a weird primitive world that appears to be the past at first, but which turns out to be our distant future. And somehow the dinosaurs have bounced back, maybe thanks to the radiation. They were only taking a siesta! There's also an android army, which makes a bit more sense.

Amazons in Warriors Of The Apocalypse

Nobody ever expects Amazon warriors to survive a global genocide. And even if you did, you wouldn't expect them to be amazons with eye-lasers, who get into an eye-laser-battle with some other dudes. Another runner up is the 1982 movie SHE, in which a giant in a tutu, a mummy in sunglasses, a Samurai, and bondage freaks all survive the end of the world.

Bob McKenzie in The Mutants of 2051 A.D., as featured in Strange Brew

Okay, so maybe you expected dinosaurs, purse dogs and Valley Girls to survive a planetary die-off. But Bob McKenzie? The co-host of Great White North, that recurring sketch on SCTV, eh? You really really didn't expect him to be the last human still alive. Check out his amazing technique for dealing with a post-apocalyptic mutant who's really not friendly. Thanks to Jeff Sparkman for suggesting this one! Another somewhat unlikely "last man" is Yorick in Y: The Last Man, who's just sort of a slacker escape artist — but he survives the disaster that kills all other men because he eats monkey poop.

Nuns

Nuns often seem to survive the death of humanity — maybe it's their religious faith, maybe it's the fact that they're sequestered from contagion and zombie outbreaks. Most awesomely, Donald G. Jackson's fantastic movie Rollerblade features a world where rollerblading nuns (with Nazi-esque emblems on their uniforms) keep the world safe from evil mutants — while rollerblading. (And they also use a switchblade to heal all wounds, causing a glowy smiley face to appear.) There are also some nuns holding out against the evil dolls-head-loving bikers in Survival Zone. And of course, who can forget Michelle Yeoh as a lone nun after the fall of civilization in Babylon A.D.? I'm sure Yeoh still has nightmares about it.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Madeline Ashby, Rory aka Cthul-who, Glamtasm, Jeff Sparkman, Luis Alberto Urrea and anyone else who helped.

I already mentioned Alien, but the prison planet on Alien 3 was actually even creepier than the smashed alien ship. That bleak, abandoned planet with its industrial freakshow prison was so depressing and hopeless that audiences stayed away from this film in droves — even though it was directed by David "Se7en" Fincher, a guy who certainly knows how to give good setting. William Gibson worked on an early version of the script. If you haven't seen this one in a while, give it a second viewing. You might be surprised.

One of the all-time most horrifying scifi settings is the hallucinatory, hellish veterans hospital in Jacob's Ladder. This film about a guy given weird "super soldier" drugs during Vietnam has strange religious overtones, but mostly is about someone driven crazy by government-conspiracy pharmaceuticals and high-tech warfare. Played with wide-eyed hysteria by a very young Tim Robbins, the guy begins seeing himself in a hospital hell, which is full of these twitchy-headed, masked demons who make the scariest dry-shuffling noises I've ever heard. Watch if you dare.

A cult movie from the mists of time (ie, 1975) called A Boy and His Dog wins for best scary, underground city long before City of Ember locked us into its spell. Featuring Don Johnson and a talking, mutant dog who is smarter than he is (yes, I know that's believable), the post-apocalyptic flick chronicles Don's foray into an underground city called "Topeka" where everybody wears weird clown makeup and lives a horrifying nightmare of suburban life, complete with enforced church-going and scary, ultra-trimmed lawns. Unfortunately for poor Don, radiation has made all the men sterile and they want to keep him prisoner and milk him for sperm (but not in a fun way). Jason Robards does an amazing job as the underground city's demented mayor. Actually, this trailer may scare you for reasons other than the underground city.

Laboratories — especially where They are experimenting on humans — are always frightening. That's what made so many scenes from The X-Files compelling.

And it's also what makes us love to fear the lab featured in Resident Evil: Extinction, where Milla Jovovich's clones kept getting tested and killed over and over again. But for sheer horror in set design, nothing can beat THX 1138, George Lucas' film about a completely sanitized, emotion-free society where everyone wears white (except the cops), every room is white, and everything is lit with insanely bright floodlamps. Filmed partly in one of San Francisco's ultra-white subway stations (the Powell St. BART station, to be exact), the whole film is saturated with a freaky fascist feeling created by Lucas' minimalist but frightening setting.

Famous names: Harlan Ellison, Don Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Jason Robards

Crunchy goodness: 4

Sights you'll never unsee: Semen. Extracting. Machine.

Life lesson: Take it from David Berkowitz: always listen to the dog.

Deadliest spoiler: She was a girl of impeccable taste.

Review at BadMovies.org