by Joseph Perry and Mike Imboden
In our “The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict” film reviews, Joseph and Mike give their thoughts on a slice of cinema. For this installment, it’s acclaimed festival hit Hundreds of Beavers, by Mike Cheslik and SRH.
Synopsis
In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews as Jean Kayak) must go from zero to hero and become North America's greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.
The Good
Joseph: Daffy, wacky, and nutty are adjectives I don’t get the opportunity to use in my film reviews often, but all three certainly apply to Hundreds of Beavers. Combining live action with animation in styles that recall silent comedies and old-school cartoons, the film is filled with absurdity, and humor that ranges from Rabelasian to knowing wink-wink in-jokes that usually falls on the greater side of broad. Though using well-tread comical styles with which many viewers will be familiar, the concept itself is filled to bursting with originality. Using people in human-sized animal suits rather than rendering those characters with CGI must have taken some doing, and Hundreds of Beavers is all the better for it.
Mike: On paper, Hundreds of Beavers probably sounds amazing. In actuality, it’s… well, it’s still kind of amazing.
With little to no dialogue — mainly just noises like “Hmmm” and “Huh” — and sparingly used intertitles, Cheslik and Tews are able to tell a fully understandable and nuanced story that plays out like a Tex Avery fever dream fully realized as a video game using actors instead of illustrations (well, there are even a few of those).
The lack of any real budget is obvious, but handled oh-so-well with green screen and the aforementioned animations, with the bulk of the money no doubt going to the animal mascot costumes used for the beavers (hundreds of them), rabbits, raccoons, and wolves. Honestly, I think it’s the lack of budget that makes this wonderful mess of a movie work. Too much more would have resulted in polished corners which would have killed the DIY chutzpah that makes things like beavers (hundreds of them) carrying logs on their shoulders to make a huge dam, and the traps that protagonist Jean Kayak uses work so well. Wile E. Coyote can only dream of making such doomed-to-fail-yet-somehow-effective traps.
The Bad
Joseph: There’s a reason that classic Looney Tunes cartoons were only around 10 minutes or so long, and there’s a reason for the comedy Rule of Three. Hundreds of Beavers becomes an endurance test, and asking viewers to stick with it for an hour and 44 minutes is a bit much, especially when some of the running gags start to wear themselves out. Cheslik and cowriter Tews seem to have kept most if not all of the ideas they came up with, and Cheslik as editor may have doubled down on that philosophy.
Mike: There’s a certain absurdity on display here that is in no uncertain terms going to make people go all-in or walk away, scoffing and muttering under their breath. These are also the uncivilized heathens who probably dislike the Three Stooges and some of the content on Adult Swim.
It also runs a little long. As ludicrously hilarious as I found this, I did catch myself starting to flick my eyes over to the time after about forty five minutes. The fact that things move at such a breakneck pace saved me from worrying too much about the time, but I can certainly see some people getting tired of the jokes which are admittedly a bit repetitive.
The Verdict
Joseph: Hundreds of Beavers feels like the type of film that is best viewed with a large theater audience peopled with like-minded souls who are seeking out something unusual. I found myself chuckling rather than laughing out loud, and doing so often, but there was a fair amount of “Okay, enough already with that gag” as well. Definitely worth a watch for its audacity and verve, try to catch the film during its theatrical run.
Mike: “Hear me out. We take an old Tex Avery animated film idea, mash it together with real actors, toss in an Atari cartridge’s worth of video game homages, fill it with cartoon violence, and skew the humor towards people who stay up way too late.”
“Can we have a trading post owner’s hot daughter do a stripper pole routine?”
“I don’t see why not!”
“Roll film!”
If that fictional conversation sounds like it would result in something you could spend more than an hour and a half watching, then Hundreds of Beavers should be a MUST SEE film for you.
Hundreds of Beavers
Directed By: Mike Cheslik
Written By: Mike Cheslik, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews
Starring: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Wes Tank
Run Time: 1h 48m
Rating: NR
Release Date: September 2022