Buffalo Rider (1976)
2/10
Do not watch this movie if you are bothered by animal cruelty!
30 March 2021
Consider yourself warned as this movie definitely cannot post that 'no animals were hurt during the making of this film'. I honestly think a lot of the actors and the one baby in this film were also probably hurt during the making of this film. This film is quite rough, suffice to say as it is almost a cross between a nature documentary and a movie. A movie that lectures us on how the buffalo were hunted to near extinction, but literally looks like the people in the film are gunning live buffalo down!

The story, what story? Literally, we get a narrator talking about buffalo and hunters for a while and then Buffalo Jones is introduced and he is apparently the Buffalo Rider of the title, but he is never referred to this in the film, but rather as Buffalo Jones, whose main skills seems impaired judgement as he has a horse, but wants to ride a buffalo, who sees these men and can tell they are dangerous, but lets himself get shot anyway. Then we witness a raccoon in a frolicking adventure battling a cougar which tries to drown the raccoon who then gets swept up in a huge flood and then a babies parents are killed and old Buffalo Jones is going to rescue said child right after he punches a cougar in the face!

The film is just crazy. The lead guy looks like a cross from a dude in a rock band and Donald Sutherland and the bad guys just stop in here and there to make it seem like the film is just not an animal nature documentary gone awry. If it were a nature doc, the animals fighting each other would be just nature's way, but in this film, we have bears fighting and you know the makers got them to fight, you have buffalo trampling wolves and several other instances of animal cruelty going on.

So, the film is rough if you cannot stand the sight of animals in pain. I can watch it, knowing that the animals would be long dead even if they were not subjected to this, but some of the scenes definitely made me wince; especially that bear fight. Just not sure why a film like this was made as it is about a man that loves animals, but then the animals that were used were definitely mistreated.
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