Hundreds of Beavers

You can only catch 'em once

Oct 28, 2024

Directed by Mike Cheslik

United States, 2022

I have never been to Wisconsin and to be honest, in the United Kingdom for most people it wouldn’t be one of the first US states to spring to mind. I do know that one of the Soviet Sputnik satellites crash-landed there in 1962, and it was also the setting for the popular sitcom Happy Days starring Richie Cunningham and The Fonz. Apparently Wisconsin has a state animal, the badger, but surely that now needs to be replaced by the supporting cast of this week’s film which hails from the Badger State: Hundreds of Beavers.

Hundreds of Beavers is not like any other film you will have seen of late. In essence it’s a comedy smorgasbord with a menu listing: a homage to silent film, Looney Tunes animation, The Legend of Zelda video game, and that smutty slapstick comedy show from the 1970s, Benny Hill. All of these ingredients are tossed into a blender and served up for your delight… or not, as was the case for much of ReidsonFilm.

The film was conceived by Milwaukee filmmakers Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, apparently for a budget of just $150,000. I guess that must have included the download fee for Adobe After Effects. There is a kind of plot to Hundreds of Beavers: a simple story, but one riddled with convoluted detours and dead ends. Set sometime in the 19th century in frontier America, the film opens with a ‘zany’ ballad about Jean Kayak (Tews) who sells applejack – a kind of American Calvados. But while getting high on his own supply a colony of beastly beavers turn up and end up burning down his still.

Stuck in the wintry wilderness Kayak humiliatingly demonstrates his incompetence at hunting, shooting, and fishing. That is, until he crosses paths with a Master Fur Trapper (Wes Tank) who takes him under his wing and teaches him the secrets of the trapper’s art. After his mentor is taken out by a pack of wolves, pictured by glowing eyes in the black of night, Kayak stakes out his territory, and sets up a trade with a fur merchant (Doug Mancheski). Next, he promptly falls in love with the merchant’s prepossessing, pole-dancing daughter (Olivia Graves) who also happens to be a dab hand with a furrier’s knife.

To win her hand in marriage the merchant has a single demand: Kayak must bring him the pelts of… hundreds of beavers. What follows is a string of ingenious methods illustrating how to commit beaver genocide, but in all honesty the storyline is beside the point here. With Hundreds of Beavers the play really is the thing.

Bizarrely accomplished … Hundreds of Beavers.

The production is a black-and-white cartoon and live-action mash-up where the forest is filled with beavers, raccoons, and rabbits zipping around the screen, all of them actors dressed up in football mascot costumes. It’s as if Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner were cast as the leads in The Revenant. Cheslik, who edited the film himself as well as creating the visual effects, strings together gag after gag using a mix of animation, green screen, and CGI. Add in a videogame logic that requires our hero to level up and gain power points, and you end up with a hi-tech vehicle with a lo-fi vibe.

The question is, does Hundreds of Beavers warrant a 108-minute running time? The majority opinion of ReidsonFilm was… definitely not. I found my mind starting to wander after around the ten-minute mark, but did I miss out? I don’t think so. Many of the pratfalls were recycled to the point of tedium and there was certainly an element of ‘tries too hard’ about the zaniness. No matter how well-crafted a joke is, it will lose its impact on the fourth or fifth viewing.

Cheslik and Tews’s ambition with their film is seemingly limitless: Hundreds of Beavers riffs on a multitude of film references, including James Bond’s Moonraker. Yes indeed, the beavers are building their very own space program. But by this point the only countdown I was interested in was ticking off the minutes to the finish. It has been reported that the idea for Hundreds of Beavers was dreamt up while under the influence. That may be the best way to watch it. Or at a children’s party. Probably not both at the same time.

So yeah these guys could probably have a long and successful career on YouTube, but no need to waste an hour and a half of my time - C

Hundreds of Beavers may have little in common with much US contemporary cinema, but it does compare, we would say unfavourably, with the unhinged inventiveness of a Japanese film that ReidsonFilm reviewed last year: