Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers evokes the golden age of cartoon slapstick and fuses it with video game-style grind to create a riotously absurd comedy on a shoestring budget. ComingSoon’s Hundreds of Beavers review goes into why.
Cheslik has previous with small-scale hilarity made big when he and Hundreds of Beavers star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews teamed for the silly and inventive Lake Michigan Monster.
Hundreds of Beavers’ setup is simple. A drunken applejack salesman named Jean Kayak sees his precious distillery destroyed and he is left to fend for himself in the wintry wilderness of North America. As he learns to survive via a catalog of calamitous mishaps, he stumbles upon the home of a surly fur trapper and his alluring daughter. eager to impress, Jean Kayak goes on an epic hunt for animal pelts.
In this screwball version of reality, the animals aren’t actually animals, but a bunch of people in animal mascot costumes, which gives us the first real taste of Hundreds of Beavers’ delectable absurdity. It also does a lot to sell the old-school physical comedy of the piece.
Jean Kayak’s job seems fairly routine on the surface, yet he begins with few resources, but the one he has got is a formidable and foolish level of inventiveness. There’s a reason why this film invites comparisons to the perilous escapades of Wil E. Coyote. Kayak has that same trap-planning ethos, but fortunately for him, he has a better hit rate than the chronically catastrophic coyote ever did.
Despite greater success at trapping his prey (usually raccoons, rabbits, and, of course, beavers), Jean Kayak isn’t afraid to try out new things. The film progresses in much the same way an open-world survival game would, as Kayak trades materials for better equipment, which in turn makes his animal killing a lot more efficient.
By the time he begins his titular quest of killing hundreds of beavers, his contraptions have truly taken on a cartoonish turn as he moves from dope-simple lures to Tears of the Kingdom-esque murder machines.
In between there’s all sorts of amusing animal shenanigans, often with an innuendo-laced smirk on its face. One of the best sight gags in the film involves rabbits and their tracks marking out their life cycle as Kayak follows them.
Ryland Brickson Cole Tews is key to Hundreds of Beavers’ slapstick success. His exaggerated silliness in Lake Michigan Monster as a Sea Captain (who wasn’t actually a Sea Captain) hunting a legendary lake beast was a highlight of that film, and here it translates beautifully to the half-cut wannabe fur trapper. He may be one of the few human characters in the movie, but he’s a character that would feel at home in the golden age of cartoon violence. The obvious human comparison is the silent movie comedy greats such as Keaton and Chaplin, but for me, it’s a performance that has more in common with Bugs Bunny than The Tramp.
Hundreds of Beavers knows how to entertain. It fires off gags like machine gun fire and with surprising levels of accuracy. There’s a small stretch before the madcap finale that feels like its taking a breather, but it gets back to full speed before you know it.
Score: 9/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 9 equates to ”Excellent”. Entertainment that reaches this level is at the top of its type. The gold standard that every creator aims to reach.
Hundreds of Beavers begins a theatrical roadshow run starting today, January 26, 2024 and ends with a screening in Toronto on February 10, 2024. A wider set of theatrical runs in the United States follows from February 9, 2024.
