Where The Buffalo Roam - Reception

Reception

The movie opened on April 25, 1980 in 464 theaters, earning $1,750,593 in its opening weekend and more than $6.6 million for a total lifetime gross.

It has been panned critically for being a series of bizarre episodes strung together rather than having a cohesive central plot. Movie historian Leonard Maltin remarked that "Even Neil Young's music score can't save this dreadful comedy, which will baffle those who aren't familiar with Hunter S. Thompson's work and insult those who are." Film critic Roger Ebert gave Where the Buffalo Roam two stars out of four and said that "The movie fails to deal convincingly with either Thompson's addictions or with his friendship with Lazlo". However, Ebert also noted that "this is the kind of bad movie that's almost worth seeing". In his review for The Washington Post, Gary Arnold wrote, "Well, the actors haven't transcended their material. They're simply stuck with it. Murray and Boyle don't emerge as a swell comic team, and they aren't funny as individuals either." Jack Kroll wrote, in his review for Newsweek magazine, "Screenwriter John Kaye has reduced Thompson's career to a rubble of disjointed episodes, and the relentless mayhem becomes tiresome chaos rather than liberating comic anarchy." In his review for the Globe and Mail, Paul McGrath wrote, "Murray is, nonetheless, the salvation of this patched-together film", and felt that "the rest is mostly filler. The story is so badly put together in the first place - and from there, badly scripted - that the movie makes almost no impact outside the infrequent hilarity". The New Yorker magazine's Roger Angell wrote, "The most surprising thing ... is how much of Thompson's tone gets into the picture".

The film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes lists the film as "rotten" with a 25% favorable rating among critics.

Universal Pictures quickly pulled it from distribution. Thompson hated the film, saying he liked Murray's performance but that he "was very disappointed in the script. It sucks – a bad, dumb, low-level, low-rent script." Years later, Murray reflected on the film, "I rented a house in L.A. with a guest house that Hunter lived in. I'd work all day and stay up all night with him; I was strong in those days. I took on another persona and that was tough to shake. I still have Hunter in me".