Hundreds of Beavers (2024, dir. Mike Cheslik)

by Jack Martin | Jul 12, 2024

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 108 mins

UK Distributor: Lightbulb Film Distribution

UK Release Date: 9 July 2024

WHO’S IN HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS?

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Wes Tank, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Mike Cheslik (director, writer, editor), Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (writer, producer), Sam Hogerton, Kurt Ravenwood and Matt Sabljak (producers), Chris Ryan (composer), Quinn Hester (cinematographer)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A frontiersman wages war against a clan of beavers…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS?

Perhaps the zaniest thing about director/writer/editor/visual effects artist Mike Cheslik’s feature debut Hundreds of Beavers, a film that is otherwise zany to the extreme, is the fact that it was made for practically nothing – and it shows. Made for only $150,000 – a mere fraction of what studios would actually spend on a comedy nowadays – and shot over a gruelling twelve weeks with a six-person crew, the film looks like something you would stumble across on YouTube, with grainy camcorder footage capturing enough green-screen and Adobe After Effects shenanigans to fill an entire lowest common denominator comedy channel.

It should be noted, though, that Hundreds of Beavers is much, much funnier than most of the stuff you would find on YouTube nowadays. In fact, the film is funnier than a lot of the other, far more expensive comedies from the last few years. It’s an absolute riot, one that may come with a low price tag but manages to deliver some utterly genius slapstick with the limited resources that it has, which also makes it one of the most unlikely success stories in recent comedy history.

Set somewhere in the snowy landscapes of 19th century Michigan, the film follows a down-on-his-luck man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, also the film’s co-writer). A former applejack salesman until his business is destroyed, Jean soon turns to fur trapping in order to make ends meet. He also falls for the beautiful daughter (Olivia Graves) of a stern local merchant (Doug Mancheski), who forbids them from marrying unless he traps and brings to him a significant amount – hundreds, if you will – of beavers.

The beavers, incidentally, are just people in costumes. The same can be said about all the animals in the film, from rabbits to raccoons to wolves to horses (the latter presented as the old two-person pantomime disguise). Even the smaller creatures, like fish and frogs and birds, are portrayed by hand (and sometimes finger) puppets, all not so subtly blended into the live performances by the actual on-screen actors. It’s one of many low budget quirks that Hundreds of Beavers wears proudly on its furry sleeve, and that very much adds to Cheslik’s jokey aesthetic that resembles some of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, specifically ones by acclaimed animator Tex Avery who, as Cheslik does in his live-action feature, revelled in the utter physics-defying and often painful insanity of his domain.

From the very beginning, as Tews’ near-silent protagonist (side note: the film is told with almost no lines of dialogue, save for grunts and occasional background conversation) makes increasingly feeble attempts to survive in the harsh winter, the cartoon inspirations are more than apparent. For one, the levels of slapstick are off the charts, with an overwhelming mixture of physical comedy, sight gags, extremely well-timed pratfalls and beyond, all of which Cheslik crafts via both fast-paced visual effects, courtesy of whatever happened to be in the filmmaker’s Adobe After Effects library at the time, and Jackass-style stunt work. There is so much going on at once, whether it’s something prominent in the foreground or something hidden in the background, that you may need to watch it at least a couple more times, just to identify every single piece of comedy that Cheslik has inserted into 100 minutes of utter madness.

But it is 100 minutes that are well spent, because Hundreds of Beavers nails pretty much every single one of its jokes, in a fashion not perhaps seen since the likes of Airplane! or The Naked Gun, or even Monty Python and the Holy Grail which similarly made mountains out of its own molehill of a budget. I can’t even count how many times I laughed out loud during this movie, since it happened so frequently that after a while I just stopped counting altogether. Few other comedies in the past number of years have gotten me to guffaw this consistently, even with its anything-goes attitude towards logic and physics.

For instance, characters will be able to gnaw intricately shaped objects out of wood with their own teeth like their fellow beavers (leaving them with few teeth in the aftermath, only for them to reappear again later on). There will be a beaver duo modelled after Sherlock Holmes and Watson that are suddenly going after the main hero. There’s a recurring gag involving a spit bucket that gets a laugh every single time. The climax of the film may or may not feature rocket ships. I could go on and on, for the list of absurd yet hilarious gags in this movie is infinite, but it is genuinely impressive how Cheslik – and by extension Tews, who appears to perform a lot of these rambunctious stunts himself – keeps such a strong gag rate throughout, not to mention the fact that the gags themselves are legitimately funny each and every time.

While there are some risqué moments (a character performs an impromptu striptease at one point), and at times it can get surprisingly gnarly with a lot of cartoonish death throughout, Hundreds of Beavers is a film that can easily be enjoyed by any age group. It’s incredibly silly with some juvenile gags involving faecal matter, but there is precise thinking behind it all, and the filmmakers do not rely too heavily on the cheaper jokes to get its laughs, with plenty of charm and wit going into its bonkers execution that makes the most out of its limited resources. Children and adults can easily laugh along with its madcap nature, but even when certain gags may go completely over their heads, it is such a fun and lively film to watch that, in the end, it hardly matters that it looks like a YouTube sketch.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Hundreds of Beavers is an endlessly funny comedy that sees filmmaker Mike Cheslik utilise his limited resources well to craft a Looney Tunes-style cavalcade of strongly thought-out, if slightly overwhelming, slapstick gags that rarely fail to generate plenty of giggles.