“Hollywood is in crisis!” screams countless headlines.
Once the home of movie magic, Tinseltown is now struggling. Legendary directors like Peter Weir are , while the likes of are wondering if cinema even has a future. Even reliable intellectual property like and aren’t the box office successes they once were.
But deep in the icy tundra of the US flyover state of Wisconsin, cinema’s saviour has emerged.
Beavers. Hundreds of them.
Hundreds Of Beavers is the anarchic indie comedy that has steamrolled out of the Midwest. The film follows the drunken applejack salesman Jean Kayak (played by the film’s cowriter, Ryland Tews). As winter hits and floods the wilderness in snow, Kayak slowly but surely develops his skills as a beaver trapper to win the hand of the merchant’s daughter, which comes at the price of catching and killing ‘hundreds of beavers’.
However, rather than the ‘man-versus-wild’ brutality of the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring The Revenant, Hundreds Of Beavers’ DNA contains the chaos of a Looney Tunes short, old silent Buster Keaton films and .
Beavers (the filmmakers and their friends wearing mascot costumes bought from a Chinese website) are pinballed into holes in the ice; lusty rabbits are lured into traps by snowmen-rabbits with breasts; and a pack of dogs while away the night by playing poker in a recurring gag referencing CM Coolidge’s much-parodied . That’s not to mention the Voltron-beaver and rocket launches.
The 'hundreds of beavers' were created from footage shot with just five beaver costumes. Credit: Trapper LLC
The film is bursting with gags, reaching absurd heights in a hilariously explosive finale. Impressively, this mostly silent, black-and-white film made in remote Wisconsin on a miniscule budget of $150,000 has become a word-of-mouth success, profiting in an age where the death of cinema is being heralded.
Origins
Filmmakers Tews and director, cowriter, editor and effects wizard Mike Cheslik are longtime friends. The pair’s earliest filmmaking efforts came in 2008 when their high school principal hired them to make for the school.
“We added jokes to it and got a lot of laughs that night from the parents,” Cheslik recalled to . “We looked at each other and in the back of the auditorium and said, ‘This feels pretty good’.”
After graduation, the pair studied film, with Tews at the nearby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Cheslik at New York University. But the pair were drawn back together when Tews conceived of the 2018 film Lake Michigan Monster. A ‘50s creature-feature spoof, Lake Michigan Monster was the brainchild of Tews, who directed, wrote and starred, and raised its US$7,000 budget through his job , and Cheslik provided editing and effects using the Adobe After Effects software, a skill he honed working for Fox Sports.
Production wilderness
The idea for the story of Hundreds Of Beavers began during a bar-room conversation between Cheslik and Tews at the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, where Lake Michigan Monster had screened. The duo decided that their next film needed to expand on that final sequence, taking the action above water and into the snow, and with lots of people in mascot costumes falling over.
“We knew that the image of a guy in a mascot costume falling down was fundamentally funny,” Cheslik told . “And if that is in every shot, even if our gags aren’t working well, we have the fundamental comedy of mascot animal.”
'Hundreds of Beavers' plays up "the fundamental comedy of mascot animal". Credit: Trapper LLC
Once the pair had the entire film storyboarded (as it relied on physical gags, there wasn’t a script due to it), Cheslik and Tews spent 12 weeks over the course of two winters (2019 and 2020) filming. Accompanied by a crew of four to five friends, they’d trudge through two feet of snow in sub-zero temperatures, dragging heavy equipment into the woods to get their shots.
Filmed on a (retailing AU$2,000) against a green screen draped over a van, they filmed Tews tackling whoever was willing to wear one of the five beaver costumes they purchased (repaying the favour with beer). All the while, the team, including producer Kurt Ravenwood, raised the $150,000 budget by showing investors footage of their vision.
After shooting, Cheslik spent four years cobbling the footage together into a slapstick extravaganza, multiplying the beaver costumes until hundreds filled the screen.
The Great Lakes roadshow
Hundreds Of Beavers finally premiered virtually in 2022 at Fantastic Fest, the Austin, Texas film festival dedicated to genre films. After a year on the circuit playing at 50 different film festivals, the film garnered awards and a cult following, but finding cinema distribution proved a challenge, especially during the post-COVID period when theatres weren’t willing to take a gamble on a black-and-white silent film from the middle of nowhere and without any stars.
“Eventually, we did get some offers, but they were not amazing offers,” producer Kurt Ravenwood told .
“[What] really bummed us out more is it seemed like most distributors wanted to put it in theatres for a week and then put it right on video on demand. We just didn’t believe that that was going to help this movie out.”
...the team took the film on tour, using a distribution strategy like old vaudeville shows.
Instead of it letting the film languish on streaming, the team took the film on tour, using a distribution strategy like old vaudeville shows. Beginning in Midwestern theatres and expanding to major cities, ‘’ turned screenings into raucous events, including filmmaker Q&As and Ryland wreaking havoc and wrestling beavers for sold-out crowds.
It’s a strategy that worked, earning the film over in the box office – a pittance for studios like Disney, but massive for a microbudget indie film. It goes to show that there is an appetite for small films featuring hundreds of beavers, and not even a dam can hold it back.
Hundreds Of Beavers is streaming on SBS On Demand.
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Hundreds of Beavers
