Film Society x The Student: “Hundreds of Beavers”

It’s 12:05 a.m. on a Friday night in November outside of Amherst Cinema and the wind has started to pick up. I didn’t dress warmly enough because up until this moment it’s felt as if winter would never truly come; we seemed to be at the beginning of the end of seasonality, among other things. It’s here now, in all its bitter force, and it feels as if the movie I just watched, “Hundreds of Beavers” (2022) forecasted this meteorological shoe-drop. I’m texting my friend, the one who I text about all the movies I see.

“Ya gotta watch this movie” (Me, 12:06 a.m.)

“You say that about every movie” (Him, 12:07 a.m.)

“No I don’t. I told you I didn’t love joker 2” (Me, 12:07 a.m.)

“No you said it was hilarious” (Him, 12:07 a.m.)

“Just cause it funny don’t mean it good” (Me, 12:08 a.m.)

“I still feel lied to” (Him, 12:10 a.m.)

“Whatever. It’s hundreds of beavers” (Me, 12:15 a.m.)

(He must’ve needed to sleep on this information before offering his opinion.)

“That looks idiotic” (Him, 9:06 a.m.)

Yes, it’s idiotic. Of course it’s idiotic. In 2018, two buddies met up in a bar in Wisconsin and they decided to throw all of their time, money, and energy into a black-and-white, largely dialogue-free slapstick comedy about an amateur trapper hunting men in rabbit and beaver costumes. It wouldn’t cost anything to make because all they would need is the snow-covered forests of the midwest, a green screen, enough gusto to convince one of their fathers to help compose the soundtrack, and hours upon hours in Adobe Premiere inserting over 150,000 special effects.

Such ambitions are usually scrapped by the time the buddies stumble back to their respective homes, but this one stuck. With a production team of six people and the requisite amount of love, Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews crafted a film that sold out Amherst Cinema, along with nearly every other theater to which it’s traveled.

A common trick to generate original work is to combine two seemingly disparate genres. “What if,” Shakespeare thought, “I took philosophical poetry and mashed it together with the revenge tragedy?” The result was “Hamlet.” “What if,” Kurosawa thought, “I combined the American Western with Japanese ‘Chambara’ or samurai sword-fighting tales?” The result was “Seven Samurai.” “What if,” Cheslik and Cole thought as they sipped their beers in that bar in Wisconsin, “we combined black-and-white slapstick with video games?” The result was “Hundreds of Beavers.”

The two friends dropped the slapstick comedy of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and the Marx Brothers in the bottom of a barrel alongside the aesthetic logic of “Super Mario Bros,” “Mario Kart,” any game with non-playable characters (NPCs) that sell you items, and “Temple Run,” and after three years of creative fermentation, the result was at least as good as any midwesterner’s homemade cider.

The combination is ingenious. Though the former had its heyday in the earliest years of cinema, and the latter has only just begun its aesthetic refinement, slapstick and video games are appealing for fundamentally similar reasons. They obviously share something along the lines of simplicity; neither of them holds pretensions of profundity. This is not to say that they can’t have anything valuable to say.

Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and “The Great Dictator” are each incisive critiques of capitalistic alienation and fascism. Similarly, as the average Redditor would correctly and fervently insist, “The Last of Us” and “Silent Hill 2” aren’t simply dopamine shots to the prefrontal cortex, but narratives exploring grief and guilt to the same standard as any decent novel. I only mean to say that though they may contain substantive content, slapstick is funny before all else and video games are fun before all else. As such, “Hundreds of Beavers” is both funny and fun.

The way that Cheslik and Cole have done it, the combination of these genres goes beyond catering to our lowbrow sensibilities. It would be impressive if they could make the various falls and brawls funny enough to keep us watching for two hours, but the film is denser and more satisfying than an “America’s Funniest Home Videos” compilation (in interviews the filmmakers credit this show as an inspiration).

Slapstick and video games employ simplicity not just as a technique for laughs but as the golden rule governing their creations of alternative worlds. The slapstick hero and the playable character are anomalies in their worlds, simultaneously fools to be laughed at and masters of their environment down to its most fundamental physics. The main character in a slapstick movie or video game may accidentally provoke a barroom brawl, but they cannot get seriously hurt in the brawl. In the case of a video game, if they do get hurt or killed, they can usually replay the encounter with more knowledge about how to succeed. With a Jackie Chan or Mikhail Baryshnikov level of grace, when either hero fails, they fail stupendously, and when they succeed, they succeed by way of clever problem-solving.

If you’ve ever played “Grand Theft Auto” (GTA), you’ve seen the same effect. Death in the game is not permanent or tragic, but part of a learning curve on the way to badassery. This is what is meant when you hear, “Check this out,” before your friend hops out of his plane with a rocket launcher, shoots it at the plane that’s chasing him, then uses the resulting propulsive momentum to land himself back in the original cockpit. Your friend is immersed in their alternative world; they’ve become a master of its alternative laws of physics to the point of aesthetic achievement.

“Hundreds of Beavers” follows the progression of a survival game. An unnamed man (Ryland Brickson Cole) is alone in the wilderness, utterly incompetent at even the most basic tasks. He soon meets a merchant (Doug Mancheski) and his beautiful daughter, a furrier (Olivia Graves), who can offer wares in exchange for beaver, rabbit, and wolf pelts. By working with a master beaver hunter (Wes Tank) and an Indian trapper (Luis Rico), our protagonist slowly acquires survival skills. He begins by trying to beat up beavers by tackling them (it’s worth remembering that all the animals in the film are somewhat grotesque costumes sourced from a Chinese website with dudes inside), and ends up inventing his own traps.

This means that our protagonist doesn’t goof his way through the movie. He’s a goof, yes, but he’s a goof in the same way that one’s starting character is a goof in the tutorial of a video game. He has no skills and no items that would make his exploration of the icy tundra easier, nor does he have basic awareness of his body as it interacts with the rest of the world. All he has are his goals: Eat food, stay warm. If I gave an amateur a controller that they’ve never used before and told them to play a game they’ve never heard of, they would move and act like our protagonist does in the opening act of the film.  

But his infantile comportment is temporary. Anyone learning how to play a game will soon find that the initially alien controls become intuitive and the rules of the alternative world become intelligible. Like any survival game, he must first survive the night by building a fire, but he realizes that the wind will blow out his fire if he’s not blocking its gust. Later he’ll figure out that he can place his fire near a tree, and that will block part of the wind, and later he’ll place his beaver corpses in front of more directions, but for now, he’s alone and cold; he’s struggling his way through the tutorial.

This progressive element is what elevates the film from being gaming-inspired to gaming-dependent (just as it’s slapstick-dependent). There are clearly aesthetic decisions lifted from the grammar of gaming: whenever our man kills an animal, there’s a little icon that marks his new loot; whenever he finds a new location, he marks it on a simple map; everything the merchant sells is in denominations of pelts; and we understand our protagonist’s progress by his ability to purchase better and better items. But the satisfaction we derive from watching the film is a product of deeper debts to gaming than just user interface inspiration.

The progression, like that in a game, is governed by a clear set of rules: Kerosene oil and poop attract beavers, rabbits will run from you on sight though they will stumble upon their attempted escape, raccoons will eat your catch if you don’t pick it up quickly enough, wolves will chase you if you make a noise in their den between their snores, a bird will peck you on the head if you whistle a certain way, fish only eat certain types of bait. These rules are learned through trial and a whole lot of error, but they stay consistent. This means that whenever our protagonist learns a new skill or sets a clever trap, not only does he get to eat, but we as audience-members are satisfied that we’ve accessed a new dimension of the alternate reality. This is what keeps people playing survival games for years: Simple rules when properly learned allow one to become a master of one’s world, to transcend basic concerns of cold and food and rise to a higher order of needs like love and luxury. Inject with the highest possible dose of gags, throw in some stunning black-and-white cinematography, and you’ve got a movie.

Maybe I’ve buried the lede. This movie is hilarious. It’s hard to even remember some of the best moments, or maybe it’s difficult to describe them in a way that adequately translates their funniness. There is, however, a society of beavers in the film that gets larger and larger, and our protagonist is put on trial in that society for the mass murder of their kind. There’s a beaver criminal justice system with beaver lawyers, beaver jurors, and a beaver judge, made possible by beaver plumbing, beaver religion, and beaver bars, wherein a beaver-brawl is fought, and this is all before we find out about the beaver spaceship. In short, there are far more than hundreds of beavers.

Comedies with as dense a script as “Hundreds of Beavers” usually can’t sustain themselves for longer than 90 minutes. The experts have yet to weigh in, but the film is certainly set to challenge the reigning cinematic champion of LPM (laughs per minute), “Airplane!” (1980), which currently holds an unmatched 3.0 LPM compared with the runner-up, “The Hangover” (2009) at 2.4 LPM (data sourced from an article in Forbes magazine). These kinds of comedies generally pack their punches in a tight 90 minutes, but “Hundreds of Beavers” puts the pedal to the medal for two hours straight. Some may say it’s too long, but I think I’d rather let them leave the theater and let the rest of us have fun than go about convincing those Debbie Downers otherwise.

The film has an ambitious marketing campaign that spreads word of the movie as if it were not only the greatest movie of all time, but perhaps the culminating mic drop for all previous culture. Unlike Charli XCX’s “Brat” album, a good product with even better marketing, “Hundreds of Beavers” is really just as seen on TV. There’s a video on the movie’s website of an audience prostrating themselves before the screen upon the film’s conclusion, bowing before their new God as if to say that they’re not worthy. Nobody did that on Friday in Amherst Cinema, but maybe it was because they had a lot of homework or something.

This review is dedicated to my friend who still responds to my texts.

“Idiotic, yes. But still a fantdstic movie” (Me, 9:10 a.m.)

“*Fantastic” (Him, 9:10 a.m.)