Hun­dreds of Beavers review – the best live-action Looney Tunes movie ever

When dis­cussing direc­tor/­co-writer Mike Cheslik’s debut fea­ture Hun­dreds of Beavers, the real chal­lenge is to not sim­ply resort to list­ing off the best jokes. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – Ches­lik and co-writer/s­tar Ryland Brick­son Cole Tews’ absur­dist, inven­tive, rock­et-pro­pelled love let­ter to slap­stick cin­e­ma is stuffed with more hys­ter­i­cal gags than entire sea­sons of acclaimed tele­vi­sion sit­coms. The tri­als of drunk­ard apple­jack mak­er Jean Kayak (Tews), forced to become a fur trap­per dur­ing a bit­ter and elon­gat­ed 19^th-cen­tu­ry win­ter after a com­bi­na­tion of beavers wreck­ing his farm and his own drunk­en hubris, have the non-ver­bal phys­i­cal com­mit­ment of Sam­mo Hung, the gag ratio of clas­sic Looney Tunes, and the expert tim­ing of Buster Keaton. All exe­cut­ed on a bare­ly six-fig­ure budget.

Hun­dreds of Beavers is inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing at its most cre­ative, excit­ing, and play­ful. The ani­mals Jean hunts are played by adults wear­ing cheap mas­cot cos­tumes, with insides filled with pack­ing peanuts (except for the fish which are sock pup­pets). The snowy Michi­gan and Wis­con­sin forests from loca­tion film­ing are often styled to resem­ble mat­te back­drops that Tews and the mas­cots flat­ly ges­tic­u­late in front of, like a George Mél­liès film or LucasArts point-and-click adven­ture game. A fun 1930s score, com­plete with a knees-up musi­cal num­ber to intro­duce Jean, is sup­ple­ment­ed by stock music whose recur­rent stings give each phase of the woods – which could risk indis­tin­guisha­bil­i­ty due to the black-and-white colour grad­ing – their own unique character.

The prospect of a delib­er­ate­ly cheap-look­ing (though nev­er cheap-feel­ing) near-two-hour silent com­e­dy won’t be for every­one, but there’s a unique vision and infec­tious sense of fun and dis­cov­ery which makes Cheslik’s film more than the sum of its con­stituent parts, allow­ing it to blow past the occa­sion­al brief lull in the action.

Cheslik’s edit­ing should be stud­ied by any bud­ding stu­dent, espe­cial­ly in the pay­off to a sequence where Jean tracks down a rab­bit that escaped his trap and cre­ative­ly inscribed its entire life sto­ry in the snow. A run­ning gag involv­ing a grumpy mer­chant Jean does busi­ness with who can­not ever seem to hit the spit­toon he shoots at always finds new ways to esca­late, and there’s a Wrong Trousers-esque log flume chase that’s more inven­tive than most tent­pole block­busters with 100x the bud­get. Any time the hard rules of the film are bro­ken for a sur­prise gag – such as the dia­logue main­ly being Pop­eye-esque grunts and screams and groans – my laugh­ter could be heard from three streets away.

Tews excels as the cen­tral piece around whom the may­hem swirls with sen­sa­tion­al phys­i­cal reac­tion instincts. Jean Kayak suf­fers Wile E. Coy­ote lev­els of pun­ish­ment and bad luck, but Tews has an innate under­dog lik­a­bil­i­ty to his facial expres­sions which makes us want to see his wacky schemes suc­ceed – although not so much that watch­ing five adults in beaver cos­tumes boot him like it’s a brawl out­side a sketchy Scun­thor­pe pub ever stops being hilarious.

If that last image doesn’t bring the slight­est smirk to your face, then I don’t know what to tell you. Some things are just innate­ly fun­ny, like the image of a grown adult in a bun­ny cos­tume being sent soar­ing towards a land­ing zone…only to uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly be skew­ered on the makeshift fence next to it. Hun­dreds of Beavers is an immac­u­late­ly con­struct­ed, glo­ri­ous­ly bizarre, whol­ly unique trib­ute to that basest of com­e­dy plea­sures, made by peo­ple whose imag­i­na­tion seem­ing­ly knows no bounds.