In Wisconsin's north woods, a pioneer named Jean Kayak harvests fruit from his orchard and distills applejack. He gets drunk. Everyone gets drunk. Beavers gnaw through the poles supporting Kayak's distillery vats and the booze gets spilled in the snow. When the fiery high-proof stuff encounters a campfire, there's a huge explosion and both the orchard and the brewing equipment are destroyed. Jean Kayak is alone in the snow, struggling to light a campfire for warmth, but the wind keeps changing and blowing out his flames. Starving, Kayak hunts rabbits. The critters are wily, but Kayak is desperate -- he imagines the rabbits as chicken drumsticks and slices of pizza, that is, as delectable morsels. Finally, Kayak kills and eats a couple of rabbits. In the forest, sepulchral beavers are filing through the woods carrying huge logs to a sort of mastaba that they are building in the middle of a flowage. (In central Wisconsin, flowages are lakes or swamps that show directional current.) Jean Kayak lugs a couple of dead rabbits to a trading post where a furrier displays exchange rates -- a certain number of rabbit pelts equals a knife, six wolf pelts will get you a rifle, three beaver pelts equals a baseball bat, ten pelts will buy you a diamond. The furrier chews tobacco and spits but the wad of juice never hit the nearby spittoon. The furrier has a comely daughter who flirts with Jean Kayak. Jean trades his pelts for the knife, an utensil that turns out to be tiny, a little blade about the length of his pinkie. The furrier's daughter cuts up the dead rabbits, extracts their internal organs, and plays with them.
Kayak sets up a trapline -- that is, a loop defined by locations where he has established traps to catch fur-bearing animals. The loop takes him through a very dense pine forest, across a frozen lake, to a precipice over a deep valley, to a cave filled with aggressive and dangerous wolves, past an Indian trading post and a rural cemetery and, then, back to the pine forest. At each station, Kayak has placed traps. For some reason, beavers are attracted by coiled turds of beaver shit and Kayak places this material in his various dead falls. Although about half the time, the traps fail, or simply catch Kayak instead of his prey, the hero begins accumulating furs for trade at the trading post. He is able to buy snowshoes, later, a bat to bludgeon his prey, and some big traps. By this time, Kayak has fallen in love with the fur-trader's daughter -- at one point, she strips down to her skivvies and does an exotic pole dance for him. (Of course, the couple's lustful encounters have to be concealed from the girl's protective father who spits tobacco juice ineffectually and carries a long rifle.) Finally, Kayak asks for the girl's hand in marriage. He is told that he can't have her unless he delivers to the trading post "hundreds of beavers." Emboldened by his love, Kayak invades the beaver's huge structure on the flowage, a mill that looks like Brueghel's tower of Babel from the outside, fights the incumbent beavers, and, ultimately massacres enough of them, to deliver the pelts of "hundreds of beavers" to the fur trader. The trader, who acts a little like Jimmy Finlayson, in the old Laurel and Hardy pictures, doesn't like the transaction, but a promise is a promise. He spits angrily and, at last, the tobacco juice hits the spittoon -- "The End."
Thus, the gist of Hundreds of Beavers, a bizarre black and white film directed by someone called Mike Cheslik, apparently released in 2022 and, now, developing, it seems, a cult following. (Cheslik is a Milwaukee film-maker and closing credits suggest that both the States of Wisconsin and Michigan subsidized parts of the film.) The movie is shot in black-and-white and its action occurs entirely outside with characters trudging through snow-filled forests and along icy-looking river rapids. (This movie is unrelentingly cold-looking -- I had to wear a sweater while watching it.) The animals slaughtered by the hero, Jean Kayak, are played by actors stomping around in the deep snow in "mascot" costumes -- that is, cloth costumes imitating rabbits, slavering wolves, and, of course, "hundreds of beavers." (There are even two men playing head and ass of a horse.) There seem to be about thirty "mascots" in the movie (this is how they are credited) but cell-phone style special effects expand their ranks to sixty or eighty figures.) The film is silent except for some old-timey music and the cries of animals -- we hear sled dogs (also mascots) whimpering on the sound track, growling and howling wolves, and so on. There are about six or seven silent film intertitles but they are, more or less, unnecessary. Most of the film has the flavor of Roadrunner and Wily Coyote cartoon -- the trapper sets traps, his prey evades him or turns the tables: he gets his limbs crushed by the jaws of his own traps, is repeatedly pulverized by falling logs in his deadfalls, gets sucked under the ice on the frozen lake and nibbled by barracuda-type fish; he has bent a sapling to make an improvised catapult but, about half the time, he gets snared in the sling shot the hurls him through the air above the icy taiga. Initially, the slapstick stunts are very funny and ingenious but the gags run out of steam half-way through the 108 minute movie. The effects are of the cut-and-paste variety -- although many of the gags have the flavor of a Buster Keaton film, there's no sense of agility, physical prowess, or danger; this is because the special effects, involving avalanches of snow, bushes full of sharp burrs (the Midwest equivalent of the barbed cacti in Roadrunner movies), trunks nibbled to razor sharp, lance-shaped spikes, falls from lofty trees and so on, are all accomplished with minimalist computer effects or animated in some way. There's really no sense that the figures traipsing around in the barrens are really located near any danger when the slapstick shenanigans, comprising 90 percent of the movie occur -- most of the stunts are implemented with some sort of crude animation..
The structure of the film is a bit like a video or computer game as imagined by the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin -- although Cheslik doesn't distress his film stock nor does he attempt the gorgeous chiaroscuro (after the manner of Joseph von Sternberg) that characterizes the Winnipeg director's work. In effect, the picture seems to be auditioning for game status -- it's like Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong or the Mario Brothers. The hero runs around a barren landscape accumulating points in the form of pelts -- he exchanges the points for bigger and better weapons and useful equipment until he has killed enough enemies (and taken their furs) to reach his objective, marriage to the fur trader's daughter. The nondescript snow-covered fields and forests where the action occurs are vividly depicted but ultimately all the same -- a mere backdrop like the buttes and canyons in a Roadrunner cartoon or the deserts landscapes in George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics. The film is surprising gory -- mascots get crushed, burned alive, speared and impaled but it's all cartoon violence; death is shown by the mascot's eyes displaying crossed "x" marks. (The hero has gutted on of his victims -- it looks like a man-sized raccoon -- and treks through the snow wearing the dad creature's head as a sort of over-sized crown.) It's also a politically incorrect movie featuring an Indian chief with a peace-pipe now and then interacting with Kayak, along the lines of a cigar-store carving. The movie is too long -- it's wildly inventive but about a half-hour of this would be sufficient. (The great Roadrunner cartoons tend to be ten or twelve minutes long; Buster Keaton's best stuff is framed as bits strung together each gag running about eight or nine minutes -- even his feature films, which tend to be about eighty minutes in length have this form. A comparison with Keaton is illuminating: Keaton's most famous (and dangerous) stunt was a falling facade, collapsing over the comedian who is spared a horrible death by standing in the exact position where an open window in the towering front of the building can frame as the structure topples. Cheslik reprises this scene not once but twice in an obvious homage to Keaton, but he just has his hero smashed into the snow in his version of the gag -- that is, there's no convenient and open window to spare Kayak. Cheslik's film features lots of chutes and ladder antics with sudden pitfalls, slippery slopes and voids in ice-covered lakes; corpses get pressed into the snow and leave footprints and outlines where they died. But there's no sizzle to the ingenious mayhem because we know that everything is done with rudimentary, if effective, special effects. The film is worth seeing and should be supported because it is certainly made very much against the grain of commercial movie-making. But it's ultimately fairly boring.
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