Pardon?

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2024

#15 :  Hundreds Of Beavers

As in many other great silent comedies, the hero of Hundreds Of Beavers has a simple goal. Laurel and Hardy had to lug a piano up some steps. Harold Lloyd had to scale a clock tower. Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) has to take down, well, hundreds of beavers (plus a load of other bothersome critters) in order to survive and get the girl of his frostbitten dreams. Aptly for a film about a trapper, Mike Cheslik’s DIY, furry-infested film, made for a budget of under $7,000, absolutely pelts you with jokes: even the timing of the title card, arriving 75 minutes into the chaos, is funny. Hyper-inventive, contagiously silly — think The Revenant meets Super Mario Bros — it is like nothing else you will see this year. (If you do see something else like it this year, please seek medical help immediately.)

I've heard of this one and it sounds utterly nuts - it's got several decent write-ups though, so I'm intrigued as to what we've got here.

Well, what we've got here is, in fact, utterly nuts. It's like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon where our hero Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews - crazy name)  various reasons, finds himself topless (and later naked) and without food in the wintry US outback and he has to outwit various varmints including rabbits, possums and (of course) beavers. And, quite obviously, said varmints are played by people in furry varmint costumes - and often outwit our hero to painful effect. But, as the film gets on, he starts to get the better of them - which is a good job because he wants to win the hand of a fair maiden and her protective father demands "hundreds of beavers" before that's going to be allowed.

It's all pretty bonkers - but then in the last third of the film it introduces a new plot strand which makes all that's gone before seem perfectly normal - it's a beaver fever dream, if you can forgive me. I'm not sure it needed it (and there's certainly an argument that a taut 80 minutes would have been better than the 108 minutes we got) but I certainly enjoyed the absolutely bonkers inventiveness of it all

RBCT (I don't have time to type his name out again) is, I think he'd agree, not the best actor in the world but this isn't a role or a film that calls for "acting". He does, however, have a good line in physical comedy which is definitely required here and so he carries the lead well - I also imagine he got very cold at times because it was film in rural Wisconsin and Michigan in winter! There are other actors in the film but they're all pretty minor roles, often being one-note (and this isn't a criticism because they are exactly what's required). I am going to call out Doug Mancheski as the merchant and Olivia Graves as his daughter because whilst they're one-note, they are also pretty amusing - and Olivia has perfectly 20s silent movie star looks.

The film is shot in black and white (lots of white, thanks to the snow) overlaid liberally with animated effects - with, I think it's fair to say, every expense spared (although the budget was $150k as opposed to the $7k that Empire stated). But the ramshackle nature of everything just adds to the charm - and just because it's done on a budget doesn't mean they haven't put a lot of effort and thought into it. There's a really nice visual gag that runs throughout the film whereby whenever anything dies they get crosses for eyes and it must have taken them ages to make sure they got them all. I do have to agree with Empire that the title card timing is indeed amusing but it's just one gag in an absolute ocean of gags - yes, some hit better than others but there's just so many of them that I found myself laughing a lot more at this than I have at many other more obvious comedies. Also jarringly, to those of a certain age, it uses Take Hart's gallery music in places - it took me a few tries to remember where I knew it from.

As Empire says, this is nothing like anything else I've seen this year (or many a year, in fact). It's easy to see how people could reject this film from the poster alone, let alone the description but in doing say they'd miss something that's inventive, funny and, for a film with minimal plot, surprisingly engaging (which is a credit to the writing). If you fancy something mad but clever, then this is a recommendation from me - it's available to stream on Shudder (which is a first) or to rent in all the usual locations.

#16 - Very entertaining