Indie Madness: HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (co-wri & dir by Mike Cheslik, 108mns, USA)

*You can stream this movie as of this writing (August 2024) via Amazon Prime and a Fandor subscription

Good friend and occasional blog contributor Matt Olsen recommended Hundreds of Beavers to this writer. Matt has an uncanny sense for amazing indie, low budget, hard to see movies that are worth a watch. So this writer took a chance.

What a wild movie.

Hundreds of Beavers, the brain-child of co-writer/director Mike Cheslik and lead actor Ryland Tews, is an absurd comedy about an aspring fur trapper who battles hundreds of beavers in the snowy wilds of Wisconsin. The kicker is that the beavers (and all the forest animals) are either people in huge mascot outfits or puppets.

The movie plays like an indescribable combination of After Effects, commitment to a drunken idea hatched at a bar, reverence for Looney Tunes cartoons, Nintendo video games, and Buster Keaton silent films.

Not everything works. Even the jokes that land are sometimes so broad you more stare at the screen than laugh. But the hit rate of glorious strangeness, hilarious gags, and crazy tonal shifts increases as the movie progresses. It feels like the moviemakers discovered the sweet spot of the movie the more they worked on it which grew their confidence to make ever better and weirder choices.

The climax which takes place in a huge beaver constructed factory/spaceship silo which doubles as a judicial court and beaver hangout is a marvel of cinematic chutzpah. There’s a kind of Temple of Doom mine cart chase sequence involving logs in water channels and beavers that actually approaches a kind of Spielberg-esque brilliance.

Made for $150,000.00 across two winters in Wisconsin with a very limited crew, a lot of green screen, but also a lot of actual wintry forest footage, Hundreds of Beavers may just point the way forward for micro-indie cinema as we know it.

Though the movie made a huge impression at countless festivals (how could it not, its ambition is staggering), no distributors picked it up. So the moviemakers self-distributed the movie, theater by theater, and doubled their budget in box office.

So from start to finish, this movie may be a beacon for the kind of DIY approach to moviemaking and movie distribution that may need to become the paradigm for inventive filmmakers the studios and streamers won’t back.

In its own weird way, Hundreds of Beavers is reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s equally bonkers debut Evil Dead. Made by a crew that didn’t know enough to know the movie was impossible to make, they just made it.

Also, because the crew wasn’t being micromanaged or shepherded by sensibilities that would have censored the stranger more nonsensical choices, the movie comes out totally bonkers. The moviemakers don’t even get to the credits until halfway through the runtime. There’s a pole dancing sequence that probably gave the movie it’s PG-13. And the movie occasionally whipsaws into near horror or even Jodorowsky strange territory despite its overall wacky tone.

Some jokes are hilarious because of how stupid they are. Early in the movie, our hero gets trained by a Master Fur Trapper who has a team of sled dogs (also people in mascot outfits). At night, at camp, the sled dogs play poker, a reference to the famous Cassius Marcellus Coolidge painting that so many folks had hanging somewhere in their suburban home in the 1980’s. It really is an obvious joke but somehow the nuttiness that we are actually seeing it works.

In fact, Cheslik and Tews hatched the idea for the movie over beers based on their shared belief that people in beaver costumes falling over in the snow would be endlessly funny. For the most part, they’re right.

At 108 minutes, the movie definitely feels like it could be a bit tighter. The side effect of complete creative freedom is sometimes leaving in bits, gags, and jokes that probably could have been trimmed out. But also, having edited projects, this writer knows that sometimes a piece achieves a certain quality and coherence that further editing can damage.

The overall effect of Hundreds of Beavers is pretty amazing. So maybe it’s perfect just the way it is. This is the kind of new cult sensation you would be pretty awesome to recommend.. It will blow your friend’s mind.

Just as Matt Olsen recommended this movie to this writer. And just as this writer’s mind was blown.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club