Where the Buffalo Roam

But it’s true, all too true, my friend. Straight from the dawn of the 80’s (1980, to be exact) Where the Buffalo Roam has, yes, Bill Murray playing a very convincing Hunter S. Thompson. The actor assigned to play Thompson’s deranged lawyer/counter part Oscar Zeta Acosta however did not truly absorb the tweak driven, rage fueled Samoan craziness that Benicio Del Toro achieved in the 1998 feature, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Still the movie was a stellar piece of drug-motivated mania typical of all things Thompson. The movie itself is relatively disjointed, bouncing from some drug and arms deal between Zeta Acosta and some subversive Mexican homosexual to Thompson’s removal from the 1972 Presidential Campaign (if you listen closely, you might detect a strange sort of love – hate undertones Thompson had/has for Nixon.)

On the NWOt scale it’s going to get a 5 1/2. The overall film had all the things necessary to make it both entertaining as well as deeply, deeply weird. However, the unfortunate casting for Zeta Acosta (called "Lazlow in this film") simply was not up to task. I think the man did the best he could, but still could not fully capture the primal psychosis that Del Toro seems perfectly at home at.

Regardless, I recommend you utilize every available measure at your disposal to watch Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.