"Hundreds of Beavers" Revives Silent-Movie Slapstick

I can't recommend this new indie movie enough, especially to families

For the one who thinks they've seen it all, along comes "Hundreds of Beavers" to prove that none of us have seen anything yet. 

Reader, I've never seen a movie quite like this.

For sure, it reminds me of Terry Gilliam's "Monty Python" animation, the great Czech animator Karel Zeman, and old Nickelodeon-Channel fare.

But when my teenage daughter walked in in the middle of it all, she started talking about how much it resembled various videogames.

For most people, Looney Tunes will come to mind. Live-action Looney Tunes.

But the heart of this is Buster Keaton-esque, a word I do not use lightly to describe “Hundreds of Beavers.” For Keaton remains a comedy master whose complex gags looked simple, and yet they could be appreciated by the simple and by the complex. 

Yet Keaton never really built a Rube-Goldberg machine of a film, which is what "Hundreds of Beavers" ends up being.

That includes a few actual Rube-Goldberg machines, which are feints, because when you get to the ending, the hundreds of beavers have constructed the Mother of all Rube Goldberg machines, something resembling the wild combination of the Temple of Set in "Conan the Barbarian" and the REPCONN test site in "Fallout: New Vegas."

And somehow, a beaver version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are involved?!

Will any of this make sense?

Yes, because like all great slapstick, there's an inexorable logic to it all. In what is kind of an open-world game, the protagonist of “Hundreds” has to figure out how to trap animals somewhere in 19th century America. Or maybe it was the 17th? But the timeframe doesn’t matter, because this movie is out of time, and space, and all notions of reason and sanity.

Still, what matters is the movie’s logic, the screwiest, zaniest kind of logic that no Hollywood movie in the last 20 years — with the exception of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — has employed so brilliantly.

The main character must trap animals to survive, and then — in Harold Lloyd style — he must win the heart of a shopkeeper's daughter. All interactions with these three human characters are scenes straight out of a silent comedy.

Yet the movie isn't quite silent: what makes it are often hilarious sound effects, such as the gross squishing of the animal dissections or the dozens of attempts to spit tobacco into a spittoon.

Anyway, the man must trap beavers, hundreds of them. Hence the title.

But before he gets to that, he's barely able to keep his clothes on. In the winter of the Midwest, or wherever he is up north, it gets cold. “Hundreds” offers us a videogame-like progression for the character, who tries and fails hundreds of times, often violently, ala Wile E. Coyote.

The trapper starts out as dumb as Elmer Fudd, unable to catch the rabbit and eventually losing all of his clothing. So he must learn to trap the right way.

This takes a lot of hardship, such as making too much noise when disturbing a nest of eggs, which summons a woodpecker, who attacks his head. The man, after being attacked several times, finds great uses for an aggressive woodpecker. In another scene, he gets stuck with burrs painfully. But is there a trapper’s use for getting painfully stuck with burrs? Yes, in fact there is.

He becomes, over the film, the Rube Goldberg of trappers.

But what is this movie in form? I cannot describe it so well. The best I can do is tell you that it’s a large dose of the old college-humor material from the early 2000s, channeling Gilliam and Keaton, mashed up with the zany, the insane, and the completely ridiculous. It’s as if a Benny Hill episode combined with an RPG videogame with a 1920s look.

I watched “Hundreds of Beavers” sight unseen with my 10-year-old son. No choice could've been better. This film is for children of all ages, including those who can tolerate the cartoonish insanity that gets turned up to "10" and beyond by the time the trapper needs to catch his hundreds of beavers. As expected, the last act is beyond the unexpected.

Incredibly, this film had a budget of $150k. I tentatively suggest that it may be studied for decades as a case where you can do an incredible amount of wild art with nothing.

And certainly, the filmic risktaking in “Hundreds” put Hollywood to shame. These moviemakers have proven that the corporate movie industry -- as we already knew -- is stale and uncreative through and through. In “Hundreds of Beavers,” they have drawn from hundreds of influences to make one of the most unique films I have ever seen. All of the multi-billions that Hollywood throws at its products cannot match what the little guys and ladies have done here in this one. Write down the director and co-writer Mike Cheslik, along with his co-creator Ryland Brickson Cole Tews. If you can buy penny stock in their future work, put a good-sized bet on it.

When we finished the film, my kids were overwhelmed. That's hard to do. I was delighted. I also know that my nice wife would've hated this film. You have to have some fondness for juvenilia so that you can tolerate "Hundreds of Beavers."

If you can muster enough of your inner screwy 10-year-old, you can see hundreds of film wonders and more, all mixed together in this gloriously stupid package, including the latest appearing title screen in a movie that I can ever remember seeing.

And that's not a gimmick. There's a logic to giving us the title screen so late, just as there is to the man's use of a woodpecker who attacks heads if it's disturbed.

This is something no one could've seen coming: somehow, "Hundreds of Beavers" makes any Looney Tunes gag or cartoon feel both safe and tame.

Now available on streaming, this is one of the year’s best movies.