150 Word Review: 'Hundreds Of Beavers' (2024)

Fur and loathing

Photo: SRH

These are lean times for comedy. Ours is a humorless, self-serious era allergic to silliness.

Hopefully, that will end soon.

Until then, check out Hundreds of Beavers, a bizarre, flesh-and-blood cartoon on a micro-budget that celebrates slapstick and sadistic woodland creatures played by actors in mascot costumes. It's an adult Looney Tune: senseless, chaotic, Beckettian. In this world, you are either doing the chasing or being chased.

This black-and-white epic stars Ryland Brickson Cole Tews as a gonzo 19th-century fur trapper fighting for survival in a winter wasteland. Imagine if Buster Keaton had starred in Iñárritu's Oscar-winning 2015 wilderness survival thriller The Revenant instead of Leonardo DiCaprio. Tews is a brilliant physical comedian and a one-man special effect: a half-clown, half-silent movie hero.

Tews also co-wrote Hundreds of Beavers with director Mike Cheslik, who fully explores timeless themes like Man versus Large, Anarchic Semi-Aquatic Rodent, and Shoeless Foot Versus Pinecone.

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