You May Have Missed: Hundreds of Beavers (Dir Mike Cheslik, 1h 48m, 2024)

Hither comes 2025, and another twelve months of films that will see us cross 450 reviews, and reach our ninth anniversary. Where better place to start this year than Hundreds of Beavers, a nigh-silent, black and white film made for $150,000, by Mike Cheslik, the director of the equally fantastic, and even more-shoestring riding Lake Michigan Monster. Hundreds of Beavers is a film with spirit, a wry sense of humour, its 1920s and 1930s influences on its sleeve and as many laughs as it has castorine menaces, as our taciturn hero, Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), attempts to eradicate the titular beavers to win the hand of the daughter of a supply store owner, in what may be one of the most remarkable, most ridiculous, and most charming films of this decade.

Kayak is, when we meet him, a successful apple-grower, and cider maker and seller in the 19th Century American frontier. This idyll, brought to us through song (much of the score is by Tews' father, Wayne Tews, and by Chris Ryan), is not to last, as, gnawing through the supports of his stills, a beaver causes calamity, one of the stills being stolen, the other destroying his bar, and, in the first of many explosions, destroying his orchard, and leaving Kayak homeless, jobless and alone in the snow, as the winter sets in. What follows, as Kayak slowly gets to grips with his time in the wilderness, befriends a local trapper, and begins to build a set of skills to hunt down the beavers that trouble him, is some of the funniest slapstick violence put to film in decades.

In black and white: Quinn Hester's cinematography inbues Beavers' antics with a period charm

Much of the charm and fun of this comes from Tews himself; it's somewhat reductive to consider such a performance as a mere "human cartoon", but this he does ably-there's more than a touch of the long suffering Tom of Tom and Jerry as Kayak is frost-bitten, set on fire, blown up, dropped out of trees, shot, beset by wolves, beavers, skunks, rabbits, woodpeckers, and the overprotective father/shopkeep (Doug Mancheski), poleaxed by logs, falling buildings, and repeatedly ending up with a pine cone through his foot...you get the point. Much as Wile E. Coyote is repeatedly put through the mill, so Kayak, as we've already recounted is repeatedly launched through an increasingly intricate series of pain and pratfalls as his massacre of beavers continue.

Tews' expressions, comically large raccoon cap and all, are animated throughout, a touch of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd's indestructibility mixed with Bugs Bunny and the Tex Avery ultraviolence at its best, imbuing his performance with a cartoonish joy d'vrie. It wears these influences with pride, throwing in references to all manner of silent comedies and classic cartoons-the falling house shot from Steamboat Bill, Jr, and Chaplin's Modern Times get nods, together with veritable handfuls of homages from Warner Bros and Disney cartoons. Much of this is down to Bobb Barito's sound design that gives everything a heft, and the cinematography by Quinn Hester that matches that grainy black and white of the period to crisp, well shot action. In a film where there is almost no dialogue and where the film's images must speak for themselves, there are dozens of cleverly done, or gloriously silly, shots.

Our hero has, nay, must be superhuman, for against him stand many perils; chief of these are the beavers. Here, the film's visual imagination and its budget perfectly coalesce-the beavers, as with all the creatures in the film, are joyfully, charmingly, cheap, a small group of actors (often duplicated many times over by bluescreen work) in mascot costumes bought online (although they cost $10,000, nearly a tenth of the film's budget). They are the perfect foil to Kayak, appearing from the film's beginning to ruin his life, destroying his livelihood, and foil every attempt to put it back on track, stealing his kills and often (comically) launching themselves at him, to kick and punch the hapless trapper as he, in turn, attempts to foil them, all of this requiring ever more complex schemes.

A glorious slapstick romp: Beavers is an unmissable piece of indie cinema.

All the while, the multitude of beavers build a towering structure of in the background of scenes, in dark echoes of Lang and Murnau. I've not even mentioned the video game references, the gleefully violent girl who Kayak seeks the hand of (Olivia Graves), the Gillam-esque mix of handdrawn, CGI backplates and compositing, the Holmes and Watson beavers that appear later in the film to track down and try Kayak for his crimes, and the entire subplot regarding Kayak's revenge on the wolves for eating his mentor. This film is positively log-jammed with ideas. It is in motion, and in execution, though, that this whole gloriously bizarre assemblage of disparate elements is at its best, this heady mix of slapstick violence, Keatonish stunts, videogame references, and, at points, yes, hundreds of beavers, crashing together to spin a yarn of revenge and fortune.

Hundreds of Beavers, above all, is a labour of love, a suggestion that cinema need not behold to the twin hegemonies of streaming and the resurgent studio system, that independent cinema is in ruder health than it has ever been, and that far from cinema being out of ideas, it's wilder and weirder than it's ever been. Of course, to hang such ideas on the furred head of the beavers is to politicise a film that is quite happy to be outlandish slapstick writ large, a gloriously silly film that proudly wears its influences upon its sleeve, yet crafts something new from old wood.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Hundreds of Beavers is available worldwide from https://www.hundredsofbeavers.com. A physical release is announced for later this January

Next week, from 19th Century America to the post apocalyptic wasteland, in a petrol-spewing myth, with the Mad Max prequel, Furiosa!