Buffalo Rider (1976)

I've written about this before. When I started high school, I was sitting in a packed classroom full of other sophomores. It was the history of Western Civilization, but it was being taught by the drama teacher. At one point, he told us that he had been in a movie over the summer. There were so many of us and we didn't know the guy, so we showed no interest at all in what he must have regarded as a major event in his life.

I felt bad about our lack of response, but it was clearly for the best. If any of us had gone to see that movie, he'd have never lived it down. I finally saw the Rifftrax version and it was just terrible. Never brag about your movie until you've seen it.

People keep saying that ANYBODY can make a movie today! Digital video is so cheap! But this thing shows that the 1970's was the golden age of any bum off the street making a movie. There was nothing in this thing that any human being would ever want to watch, yet it got a theatrical release.  

It had footage of buffalo being killed, a fight between two bears, a mountain lion trying to kill a raccoon by holding it under water, a raccoon being swept down a river, a buffalo nearly drowning trying to cross a river.

There was some human suffering, too, but it was off-camera. The "actor" in the title role got his foot caught in a stirrup and was dragged a few hundred yards with a broken ankle.

The lowest level of art appreciation is where you judge a work according to the difficulty the artist had producing it. I don't think the makers of this thing had any coherent thoughts about this, but on a sub-verbal level, I think that's probably what they had in mind as they filmed it.

There's an abbreviated version of the movie on YouTube called "Guy on a Buffalo" with musical accompaniment by a band from Austin or somewhere. 

The full movie is available on a Roku channel, but I'm not recommending it.