Film review – Hundreds of Beavers

Here’s a review of Hundreds of Beavers – from a forthcoming column in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine (which explains the particular slant).

Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), proprietor of the Acme Applejack concern in a 19^th century American frontier wilderness, is reduced to penury when his business is destroyed by a slapstick combination of gnawing beavers and his own high-on-his-own-supply drunken ineptitute.  In a frozen forest, with only the clothes on his back and the teeth in his head, he survives and gets his own back by becoming a trapper – tangling not only with his beaver nemeses but wily rabbits, ravenous wolves, crochet fish, buzzing flies and a mean-spirited woodpecker.  He feeds and clothes himself – and sports a huge beaver-head hat for most of the rest of the picture – and is set a task by a merchant (Doug Mancheski).  In order to wed a furrier (Olivia Graves), he must trap and deliver ‘hundreds of beavers’.

Written by Tews and director Mike Cheslik – who worked on the equally odd Lake Michigan Monster (2018) – Hundreds of Beavers is a tribute to silent comedy and Looney Tunes, made in real snowy forests and on cardboard or CG sets.  The relatively small human cast is augmented by a horde of ‘mascots’: mimes in baggy animal costumes of the sort found at Disneyland or supporting sports teams.  Even when slaughtered, dismembered or chewed to bits, the mascots are sort of cute and funny – but the fact that there are people inside adds a sneaky undertaste of real horror.  This is the wolf-eat-dog, hunter-vs-rabbit, man-against-kaiju-beaver world of animated cartoons played out against a real historical backdrop of brutal manifest destiny.  Jean Kayak, amiable buffoon and Northwoods Robinson Crusoe, is also a walking eco-catastrophe – just as many silent comic heroes leave slapstick chaos and destruction in their wakes, Jean is responsible for an enormous amount of devastation.

It’s a remarkable achievement which gets past what you think will be its problem – sustaining a spot-gag-based non-verbal comedy for 108 minutes – with ingenuity, deploying one-off jokes which more often than not set up other, even funnier jokes.  A trapper’s dogs are seen playing poker around a fire, which is funny in itself but the scene gets funnier and darker on successive nights as wolves snatch the dogs one by one – with the last dog glumly playing solitaire.  Another running joke is the reason Hundreds of Beavers is being reviewed in this column.  After he’s mastered the Wile E. Coyote method of overly intricate animal traps, the site of one of Jean’s kills is investigated by a pair of beavers costumed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson … again, the image seems good for its single solid laugh but the characters come back and intersect with the plot as Jean braves a beaver metropolis and finds himself on trial for mass murder (as it happens, a fair cop – he’s even wearing the evidence) and the master sleuth beaver appears as a prosecution witness to interpret marks left in the snow by Jean’s malfunctioning but lethal traps.  What’s especially funny is that beaver Holmes jumps to wild, wrong conclusions.