If you love physical comedy or just weird and original movies, you need to see Hundreds of Beavers. Filmed in Milwaukee during the pandemic for a paltry $150,000 – despite the purported 1,500 effects shots made using Adobe After Effects on a home computer – this indescribable film joins the pantheon of great micro-budget movies like Eraserhead and El Mariachi, made entirely outside the Hollywood system.
The movie’s official website describes it as a “supernatural winter epic” that takes place in a “surreal” landscape populated by woodland creatures “played by actors in full-sized mascot costumes.” (Yes, that means the beavers are six feet tall and made of polyester.) The synopsis gestures at a romance plot, but the story matters exactly as little as the story matters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, This is Spinal Tap, or Evil Dead II. Or, more to the point, the story matters exactly as much as the story of a video game.
Circulating at film festivals since its completion in 2022, and self-distributed in a “roadshow” tour of the Midwest, Hundreds of Beavers has now it has finally arrived for video rental on demand and on the Fandor streaming service. It will undoubtedly be a midnight cult classic for years to come. But you’ll have to trust me on this, because there is no way to explain what the hell this movie is. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I could call Hundreds of Beavers the bastard love child of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy, raised by animator Chuck Jones. Would that make sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the movie? It’s essentially a silent film with a vaudeville sense of physical comedy, heavily influenced by video game mechanics.
The movie opens with a musical number that sets up the character and situation like a video game opening cutscene. Aspiring frontier-era fur trapper Jean Kayak, played by co-writer Ryland Tews, starts with little skill but he gradually acquires upgrades. (Tews is great, by the way. He has been compared to Buster Keaton, but his smug but dim-witted persona and rubbery physicality reminded me the most of Bruce Campbell in something like Army of Darkness. It’s an absolute joy to watch him get his ass kicked by dudes in beaver suits.)
Kayak navigates the wilderness on a map – the sort of in-game map that the Mario Brothers or The Legend of Zelda’s Link would use – and after he captures rabbits, beavers, racoons, or whatever, he takes them to the fur-trading post where he sells them for supplies like axes and ropes that he selects from a game-style menu. Eventually he accepts a quest from the fur trader to acquire “hundreds of beavers” in order to win the hand of the trader’s daughter. But, again, the story doesn’t really matter. It’s simply an excuse to level up the hero or his obstacles and create new situations for comic absurdity.
Like the original Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons that inspired it, Hundreds of Beavers is simple and repetitive but impressively inventive, like slapstick jazz building to a satisfyingly over-the-top crescendo that leaves you wanting more. No matter what you imagine a guy fighting hundreds of beavers might look like, I guarantee your ordinary human mind could never conceive the spectacular climactic extravaganza in which the eponymous legion of rodents launch a full-scale battle against the hapless fur trader.
Objectively speaking, Hundreds of Beavers is 108 minutes of stuntmen dressed as furries acting out dialogue-free scenes from Looney Tunes. That description gives you a sense of how deeply and magnificently stupid this movie is, but not how literate it is. Director and co-writer Mike Cheslik, an NYU film school grad, crams the movie full of references to classic films. He even created a Letterboxd list detailing almost 100 cinematic influences, including silents and cartoons starring the likes of Buster Keaton and Bugs Bunny, as well as film school favorites like Jacques Tati’s Playtime and Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee alongside low-brow Hollywood fare like Top Secret! from Airplane! creators Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker or Snow Day starring Chevy Chase and Chris Elliot. It all goes into a blender, with a heavy dose of video game mechanics, and comes out a slapstick masterpiece of sublime silliness.
Self-produced and distributed outside the Hollywood system, Hundreds of Beavers is unrated, but it would probably be PG-13. It contains pervasive slapstick violence with lots of dead beavers – meaning a human-size plush beaver suit with X’s for eyes which, when butchered, reveals foam packing peanuts inside. And there are a handful of sexually risqué jokes, though they’re not much different than the sort of gags that might have been on Looney Tunes. (I mean, think of how Bugs Bunny acted when he saw that lady rabbit or how he would dress in drag to trap Elmer Fudd.)
Hundreds of Beavers is streaming on Fandor, also available for rental on demand, or if you’re lucky it might be coming soon to an indie theater near you where you can watch it with a crowd.
