101: Hundreds of Beavers

I have seen the future of midnight movie madness, and it is called Hundreds of Beavers.

Somewhere deep in the woods of 19th-century northern Wisconsin, an applejack salesman (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who co-wrote the movie with director Mike Cheslik) finds that his liquor supply has dried up, and he must find other ways to survive. Because it’s the 1800s and he’s in the northern woods in winter, the salesman turns to trapping animals, and because he’s in a shoestring-budget indie movie with a Looney Tunes sensibility, all those animals are played by people in mascot costumes.

Tews and Cheslik rely on a series of increasingly complex and interconnected sight gags to communicate the stakes and plot developments of their story. According to an interview with the Lake Effect podcast, there was no written script, just a series of sketches of the different stunts the filmmmakers wanted to include, and the resulting movie has virtually no dialogue. To get their point across, they make liberal use of a grainy black-and-white filter, intentionally crude computer-generated props (which give the movie’s look a flavor of collage), and Tews’s expressive face. Cinematographer Quinn Hester keeps the action at a friendly remove, framing the characters’ entire bodies at a steady medium distance except at points of extreme emotion, when all bets are off and he ditches the locked-off camera for extreme handheld closeups. The result is a distinct mash-up of silent-film comedies and TikTok pacing; it’s as though Buster Keaton and Evil Dead-era Sam Raimi had a movie baby together.

It’s a lot of fun to watch a small group of people make something stupid. Hundreds of Beavers is kind of stupid, in that it’s a classic hero’s journey story with all the cliches and baggage that comes along with that specific plot template. But it’s so smart about how it goes about its stupidity, and it’s so committed to its setting and its jokes that I found myself swept up in its relentless pace. When the movie ended, I felt like I’d run a marathon; I also wanted to stand up and cheer.

Hundreds of Beavers hits Prime and Apple TV on April 15, but if you can see it in a movie theater with a crowd, do it.

What I watched:

It’s been a good week for movies at Chicago arthouse cinemas. We caught a screening of Tron: Legacy at the Music Box Theatre last weekend as part of their 3D-projected series; the dialogue is sublimely stupid, but the movie has a lot on its mind, and it channels most of its thoughts into its production design in ways that I think most viewers don’t give it credit for. I genuinely love it.

I also saw Michael Mann’s Heat at Doc Films, which means I cried over the end of Heat at Doc Films. I’m grateful for repertory theaters; I’d only ever seen the movie before at home, and while our TV and sound system are decent, they’re not much of a substitute for the roar of guns and airplane engines on a proper theater system. There were two women seated behind me who’d never seen the movie before, and one of them gasped out loud when De Niro reaches for Pacino’s hand in the final scene. I loved her for that.