HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS: A Fur Trapping Photoplay Of The Highest Order

In 2018, writer/director Ryland Brickson Cole Tews unleashed Lake Michigan Monster, a miniscule-budgeted, Steve Zissou-esque tale of maritime vengeance set in the American midwest. Purportedly shot for a budget of $7,000 (side note: adjusted for inflation, Robert Rodriguez’s 1992 debut El Mariachi would cost nearly $16,000 today), Tews used every trick in the book to shape a 78-minute narrative, often relying heavily on green screen effects to fulfill his vision. By no means a box office barnstormer, Lake Michigan Monster still charmed audiences at film festivals with its daffy comedic sensibilities and stupendous visual imagination. The film may have been held together with duct tape and dreams, but it was not completely without charm.

Not the least bit deterred, Tews has returned with Hundreds of Beavers, which has been self-labeled as a “fur trapping photoplay”. Armed with a magnified – though still paltry by today’s filmmaking standards – budget and extended runtime, Tews has passed helming duties off to Lake Michigan Monster editor Mike Cheslik to tell another tale of vengeance, this time against a legion of woodland critters. Once again utilizing heavy greenscreen effects, Hundreds of Beavers is a comedic masterpiece, delivering an onslaught of hysterical sight gags, formal ingenuity, and cathartic woodland violence. Having premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2022, the film is now widely available for audiences to see one of the year’s best films for themselves.

The Revenant Meets Tex Avery

Life is great for applejack proprietor Jean Kayak (Tews). The owner of a thriving business, Jean is the regular center of merriment and revelry for customers far and wide, enjoying a healthy amount of cheery patronage who seek his special alcoholic cider. He’s the king of his own little world, until trouble arrives one day in the form of beavers, who chew the support legs off of his enormous cider casks, making off with half of his supply while the other half ends up destroying his home in a blazing inferno. Emerging homeless, hungry, and impressively bearded in the dead of winter, Jean must now learn to survive the elements on his own before extracting vengeance on the varmints that have wronged him.

While the premise is deceptively simple, the marvel of Hundreds of Beavers lies in its wondrous execution. With the exception of a few genuine locations, Tews is largely roaming a digital playground, with nearly every aspect of his environment added in post-production. Just like Lake Michigan Monster, Hundreds of Beavers is rendered in black-and-white, allowing for a lot of gorgeous high-contrast images while helping disguise the project’s seams, except this time around dialogue has been eschewed almost completely, relying purely on Silent Movie filmmaking to tell the story. The wealth of imagination on display is endless, watching as our intrepid hero scales snowy hills, treks through wooded forests, and slides across frozen lakes. Cheslik is akin to a kid in a sandbox when it comes to crafting his winter wonderland, but he’s never winking at the audience, refusing to break the illusion.

Even better is the depiction of the animals themselves. It probably goes without saying that no film would earn this much critical attention if its primary objective was the murder of various woodland creatures, simulated or not. Thankfully, Cheslik and Co. sidestep this issue immediately, with all large animals, such as beavers, rabbits, and raccoons, portrayed as actors in full-body mascot suits, while smaller animals, such as fish, frogs, and even flies that circle freshly-dropped dung, are realized as lovingly hand-crafted puppets. It’s this sole distinction that makes Hundreds of Beavers remarkable, as all woodland violence instantly becomes palatable when the film essentially becomes a live-action cartoon (complete with X’s for eyes to signify death). Think Hugh Glass waging war with the cast of Looney Tunes and you’re halfway there.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

Hundreds of Beavers takes its time to get rolling, letting the film breathe before the opening credits hit around the thirty-minute mark (the title of the film itself is a magnificent payoff that gets saved for later). The film finds its footing early on with Jean in the wild, observing as the former applejack vendor becomes one with nature, resulting in a lot of trial-and-error as he hones his outdoorsman skills. Cheslik mines a lot of comedy out of these scenarios, as Jean’s plans continuously gets foiled in hilarious, often painful ways.

The world of Hundreds of Beavers eventually expands to introduce The Merchant (Doug Mancheski), an irascible trader who can never seem to hit his spittoon, and his fetching daughter, The Furrier (Olivia Graves), who vies for Jean’s affection. Jean also spends time with The Master Fur Trapper (Wes Tank), who offers our hero a lay of the land and introduces Jean to the preferable baiting techniques for the various forest animals. Jean may be new to the fur trapping scene, but he’s not completely hopeless, It’s a beautiful arc that gets wonderfully explored by Cheslik, and Tews is pitch perfect as Jean, delivering a terrifically animated performance without the benefit of dialogue. He’s an absolute joy to watch.

Cheslik plegdes his allegiance to Looney Tunes, but Hundreds of Beavers ends up representing something of a video game, as Jean’s skills increase and his fur trading with the The Merchant nets him more coin, which can be used to upgrade weaponry. The initial goings are primitive, but Jean eventually grows into a super-powered Angel of Death, laying waste to all furry critters who have wronged him with increasingly elaborate traps. Suspicion arises in enemy territory, which dispatches its very own beaver Sherlock Holmes and Watson on the case, as the proceedings all come to a head in the ominous looking beaver stronghold that looms in the background.

Conclusion

For the final act of Hundreds of Beavers, Cheslik and Tews pull out all the stops (if such a thing were possible), delivering an epic grand finale that features no less than a showdown in a Rube Goldberg-esque beaver fortress, an impromptu kangaroo court, a flurry of fisticuffs, and a chase sequence that features what can only be described as a Beaver Voltron. Hundreds of Beavers is undoubtedly silly, but it’s a film with a lot of heart and wit, and it delivers what it promises, fashioning a wild piece of entertainment that sustains laughs for the entire runtime. I cannot wait to see what they do next.

What do you think? Does Hundreds of Beavers have what it takes to be a modern classic? Let us know in the comments below!

Hundreds of Beavers is now playing in select cinemas and available to stream on digital.