★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 For Gonzo cartoon violence
Directed by Michael Cheslik
This film really shouldn’t work. Hundreds of Beavers is a silent black-and-white slapstick comedy featuring mascot costumed furries and resembles a side-scrolling video game. Surprisingly, it works stunningly well. It has the physical comic timing of Buster Keaton, the cut-out flat film depth and bodacious humor of South Park, the fur-lined absurdity of Deerskin, and most of all the madcap silly violence and sad sack comedy of the Looney Tunes. The sum of the parts manages to formulate a wildly imaginative unique story that almost certainly cannot be duplicated.
Sometimes, with movies as strange as this, the best description of the film is provided by the producers.
In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.
SRH Productions
We are introduced to Jean Kayak (Ryan Brickson Cole Tews), a successful distiller of applejack hard cider, who partakes too often in his own product. His drunken shenanigans come to haunt him as he allows his distillery to explode, ruining his business and putting him into a coma. Jean wakes from a Rip Van Winkle-like slumber in a blanket of winter snow with no idea how to survive the frozen winter. Jean attempts to catch rabbits for food, but despite his creativity, he is a terrible hunter. All he is able to catch are fish by mutilating his fingers to attract fish as live bait.
He stumbles across a nearby merchant (Doug Mancheski) and his beautiful daughter (Olivia Graves) who happens to be the furrier. Jean realizes that if he can up his hunting game, he can get some money, and get the girl too! The only problem is that the trader is looking to marry his daughter off to the Master Fur Trapper (Wes Tank). Clearly, the trader is not going to let a failed drunk like Jean anywhere near his daughter.
So if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Jean teams up with the Master Fur Trapper and his pack of hunting hounds to learn what it takes to be a successful hunter. The woods are a dangerous place though, a pack of wolves winnows down the hunting party and soon Jean is left alone to figure out how to do this by himself, and to achieve legendary status himself by trapping HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS.
Do you enjoy Looney Tunes cartoons? To this day I can watch the pratfalls of Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, Elmer Fudd, and Sylvester the Cat. Why not Bugs Bunny? Because these other characters are LOSERS. They want to be winners so badly but fail so miserably that it makes you bust into peals of laughter. Seriously, those old cartoons still hold up as an adult. Yoiks and AWAAAAAAYYYY! (Smack!) Jean Kayak is one of those losers. In these madcap comedies, you always root for the losers. Partly, you must be honest with yourselves, and recognize that you want to see crazy shit happen to these sad sacks, because it makes you laugh.
As our comic foil, Tews is such a great mime with his exaggerated physical comedy, and his literally jaw-dropping expressions immediately get you on his side. And you still want to see him get whacked with a big ol’ tree branch, don’t you?
You don’t need dialogue in this film. When needed, even some fun goofy equations are provided, in a video-gamey side-quest manner. Kill ten raccoons, loot the bodies, and bring them back to the trader. Get the girl. Carrots attract rabbits and rabbits attract raccoons. If you want to catch a raccoon, start with a carrot. And the wonderful Rube Goldberg traps are hysterical. One thing that separates this movie from the Saturday Morning cartoons is that it isn’t afraid to be fake-gory. It reminds me of Dave Made a Maze. in the super-gory-but-not aspect. The mascot costumes come with their own guts! Also, the use of “X” over the eyes is a terrific time-honored way of indicating death, usually preceded by a bonk of the head.
There are so many terrific physical gags in this film that it makes me wish that I had seen this in a full theater. I can imagine the roar of the crowd as the pratfalls get sillier and sillier. Using the rough cartoon backdrops and odd depth of field gives the film a storybook feel, again harkening back to a younger age.
One thing that this movie thankfully avoids is going too far into adult entertainment. Failed attempts at this include The Banana Splits and Pooh Blood and Honey, which over-extended their reach in trying to be raunchy and counter to expectations but end up obnoxious and awful as a result. Similarly, Willy’s Wonderland attempts but doesn’t reach the level of fun and silliness of this movie. Hundreds of Beavers is cartoonishly gross, and sexy enough, without being crass.
Full credit to the costume designer of this gonzo film. Casey Harris created a small army of furries for this film. Dogs, raccoons, skunks, wolves, rabbits, frogs, and of course… beavers. There’s a great series of gags that includes a Holmes and Watson detective beaver pair who are investigating the crimes committed upon their population.
Is this a horror film? No, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it horror adjacent. It would also be safe to say this is a genre of ONE. (Actually make it TWO, as this film shares a lot of traits as its step-parent film, Lake Michigan Monster, directed by Tews and written by Tews and Cheslik.) It appears that the industry believes it has some horror to it. For proof, Hundreds of Beavers has been accumulating best-in-show awards at horror festivals around the world (Notably it won best International film at Fantaspoa and Fantasia. The Scariest Things caught this screener courtesy of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. Evidently, genre film festivals were eager to get into their programs, including many horror festivals.
This has the potential of being one of those films that really lasts. As a high-level festival performer, it has the chance of reaching cult hero status like One Cut of the Dead. Will it ever hit mainstream success? Unlikely. But, remember that really weird film from a year ago that A24 picked up? Well, Everything Everywhere All at Once did alright, didn’t it? Now, I am not saying this is a candidate for an Oscar… but the Golden Globes still has a category for best comedy, and I will be damned if there are five funnier films that get released this year than Hundreds of Beavers. Currently, there is no distributor for this film. C’mon A24 take the furry bait! (Or IFC Midnight or Epic Films… this would be a great addition for your catalog!)
Hundreds of Beavers is not rated but would likely warrant a PG-13 rating for cartoonish violence and simulated gore, along with some mild sexual content. Currently, the movie does not have a wide theatrical or streaming release. Like One Cut of the Dead, this feels like a movie destined for a long festival run.
