'Hundreds of Beavers,' Hundreds of Laughs
This instant cult classic is delightfully silly and charmingly homemade.
Independent filmmakers have struggled to work around their lack of resources since time immemorial. More often than not, this involves coming up with a story that will allow them to hide, or at least downplay, this dearth of time, money, and professional sheen; movies like Clerks, Pi, and Following don’t necessarily want you to spend time thinking about how cheaply they were made as you’re watching them.
Hundreds of Beavers takes the complete opposite approach: it leans into its micro-budget and turns that potential weakness into a strength. It was made by director/editor/co-writer Mike Cheslik and producer/star/co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, a pair of childhood buddies from Wisconsin, for roughly 2% of Bad Boys 4’s craft services budget, which the filmmakers do not try to hide or downplay in any fashion: Hundreds of Beavers is a delightfully silly slapstick comedy in which the crudity of the production is part of the joke.
The most obvious example of this being that the titular beavers are played by actors in mascot costumes.
Black-and-white and almost entirely free of dialogue (but not sound or music, including an insanely catchy song about applejack), Hundreds of Beavers follows a 19th-century fur trapper, Jean Kayak (Tews), as he tries to survive a harsh winter whilst waging war against - you guessed it - hundreds of beavers.
More than one critic has already compared the film to a live-action Looney Tunes episode; specifically, it’s like one of the two-hander segments in which one character relentlessly pursues another character with less-than-stellar results: think Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, any given Pepé Le Pew story, etc. (I would not be shocked Cheslik and Tews were also fans of the comic strip Spy vs. Spy). The structure is episodic (Jean Kayak hatches a plan; the plan goes humorously awry; repeat), and the tone is as broad as the universe is wide: there is no adherence to the laws of physics or biology. Explosions are painful but not fatal, there’s a recurring gag about Jean falling through holes in the ground, at one point, while starving, he hallucinates that a rabbit (also a dude in a mascot costume) turns into a giant chicken leg, and so on and so forth.
That Cheslik and Tews are able to sustain such a simple premise for 108 gloriously giggle-guaranteeing minutes is a true testament to the power of creativity and the ways in which ingenuity can blossom from restriction. The charmingly homemade feel of Hundreds of Beavers only bolsters its cartoonish antics; in fact, I think if you took the same exact script and gave it to someone with the budget to include photorealistic CGI beavers, you’d probably wind up with a less fun movie (although there are plenty of computer effects in this movie, they were all done by Cheslik on his home computer, and are ostensibly the VFX equivalent of guys in mascot costumes). It’s clearly a labor of love, which makes Hundreds of Beavers feel special in a way a polished, corporate product could simply never be. Hundreds of Beavers instills one with the same sense of joy you’d get from accidentally stumbling upon an insanely talented bar band.
And I do mean talented: on paper, an endeavor this ridiculous probably looks easy, but it ain’t. Cheslik and Tews have cited Buster Keaton, Abbott and Costello, and Jackie Chan as influences, and it’s clear that they have, indeed, studied the greats of physical comedy. Hundreds of Beavers would just be a gimmick flick if not for the fact that it’s legitimately funny as hell.
Hundreds of Beavers wasn’t just independently produced - when the movie couldn’t land a distributor, its creators decided to tour it around the country, in a car older than they are, renting out theaters and hosting their own screenings… and most of those screenings reportedly sold out. In a year when so many big-budget studio blockbusters are proving to be failures both creatively and financially, it’s heartening to see such a truly DIY film - and such a great film! - connect with people. The ways mass audiences consume cinema may be changing, but Hundreds of Beavers proves it’s far from dead.