Plagued by nightmares of a giant white buffalo, Wild Bill Hickok leaves his comfortable live back east and heads into the Black Hills in search of the beast he is sure lurks there. He's joined on his quest by an irascible old friend and a mysterious native who calls himself "Worm", but whom the audience knows is Crazy Horse, and who has his own reasons for seeking the white buffalo.
The success of Jaws launched a great many "killer critter" films, and in 1977 Dino De Launrentiis made not one but two stabs at the genre, with the notoriously awful Orca and this offering, which features a somnambulistic Charles Bronson in the lead role and owes more than a dash of debt to Melville's Moby Dick, most obviously in the colour of the animal but also in the sticky ends that come to those who seek revenge during the course of the film.
The film also owes a debt to revisionist westerns such as Soldier Blue or De Launrentiis's own Mandingo, though it rather tries to both have its cake and eat it too, on that front. The US cavalry are corrupt and incompetent, and the seizing of native land is shown as a question of greed and force ("we want the land, and we have more people and better weapons" Hickok tells Crazy Horse), but the action scenes are straight out of John Wayne's heyday.
A bigger problem is that the film's also rather confused as to the nature of its titular character. There's plenty to suggest that the white buffalo is a demon or other kind of malevolent supernatural force - Hickok's dreams, what it does to make Crazy Horse hunt it, and its seeming ability to teleport around to wherever the script needs it - but at other times it's treated as a purely mundane (albeit unusually big and powerful) creature. Ambiguity on a question like that has the potential to be powerful when used carefully and in a planned and strategic manner, but in the case of this film it comes across as confused and muddled instead.
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