Director: Mike Cheslik
Stars: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Doug Mancheski, Olivia Graves
There are a great number of variant posters for Mike Cheslik’s touring festival hit Hundreds of Beavers, most of which reconfigure iconic one sheets from the pantheon of classic movies. The Godfather, Chinatown, Die Hard, Fight Club and many, many more. Even the most prolific poster used to promote the film riffs on another; Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. All of which is to say that Cheslik’s $150,000 indie has clear aspirations to connect to a century-old legacy of cinema greats. That’s ambition. And such industriousness and wherewith all is all over the sprawling, maniacal Hundreds of Beavers.
For all these wide-ranging cineaste hat-tips, the greatest influences on Hundreds of Beavers are clearly the silent comedians of a hundred years ago; Buster Keaton and – to a lesser extent – Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. Cheslik and his forever-game leading man Ryland Brickson Cole Tews covet these timeless stunt performers, utilising modern animation software to collage their wintry tale into something akin to a digitally magnified Tex Avery cartoon. Hundreds of Beavers is so fastidiously built in post that one might make a good argument for it’s status as an animated film.
Brickson Cole Tews (unsure where the last name honestly begins here) plays Jean Kayak of the Acme Applejack cider company (the use of ‘Acme’ here ought to tell you a lot about this movie’s tone and intentions), fermenting apples out in the snowy wilderness of Michigan. When his distillery is destroyed via his own catastrophic ineptitude, Kayak is left hungry and desolate. Thus begins an odyssey of survival, with our poor inept Kayak slowly but surely acquiring skills through trial and error, and often a lot more error.
On discovering a trading post helmed by Doug Mancheski’s cheeky Merchant, Kayak discovers the rickety ladder of commerce and, more importantly, the potential for romance with the Merchant’s Furrier daughter (Olivia Graves). Her affections come at a high price, however, and Kayak is driven to exhaustingly elaborate and commendably comic ends to precure enough pelts to be deemed worthy by her disapproving daddy.
This narrative of rickety construction is little more than a washing line for Cheslik and his team to string up one crazy physics-defying gag after another, most centring upon Kayak’s hard-accumulated skills hunting (or being hunted) out in the wild with any number of creatures represented by ‘mascots’ – human stunt players in ridiculous animal costumes. Quite often Hundreds of Beavers looks like some improbable furry iteration of Jackass, and is never funnier than when Cheslik just lets the camera roll on a bunch of guys falling on their butts for the sake of a take. The gags come thick and fast, snowballing as rapidly as some of Kayak’s rabbit-trapping techniques, and the best of them turn into long running ‘bits’ (the whistle/woodpecker bit never failed to crack this viewer’s jaw).
Dementedly, this goes on for an hour and a quarter before we even get to the movie’s triumphant title card. If exhaustion has set in by this point, that’s understandable. The mid-section comes closest to sagging as we doggedly follow Kayak as he travels in circles trying to smoke out a gang of deadly wolves who have stolen a precious sack of beaver hides. But perseverance is richly rewarded once the movie regroups and super-charges its way to a far more visually dynamic (and hair-brained) finale.
For all the rabbits, racoons, wolves, fish and flies, it’s the marathon showdown with the movie’s titular beavers that really raises the roof. Here Cheslik piles on more far-flung influences, from any number of classic platform video games to the dark absurdities of Kafka and Orwell, stopping off for the most improbable of barroom brawls along the way. The eventual fever-pitch hysteria allows Hundreds of Beavers the crescendo that such a circuitous build-up deserves.
With such a specific brand of comedy mined so acutely and for so long, Hundreds of Beavers will garner itself an equally specific brand of devotee. Others will be mystified. But the loyal will rally behind this one in their hundreds. With no real equal in recent independent cinema, Cheslik and his collaborators have crafted something unique here; a melting pot of influences that’ll play to new audiences like a bombardment of GIFs and memes, in the process providing the keys to an oft-forgotten golden age.
The Lost Highway Hotel 