hen Jean Kayak’s (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) Acme Applejack distillery is sabotaged by some vexatious beavers – though his orchard is ultimately destroyed by his own drunken recklessness – he sets about planning a convoluted, largely inept revenge scheme (involving increasingly arduous trades with a merchant to acquire superior trapping equipment). Of course, the icy wilderness becomes the first hurdle, as he struggles with building a fire amid a relentless snowstorm. And then he must contend with pervasive hunger, bothersome rabbits, and ravenous wolves, all before he can set his sights on the log-gathering beavers.

Beginning with a song and animated components to supplement black-and-white cinematography, “Hundreds of Beavers” is very much a Looney Tunes cartoon come to life, not just with chirpy, cheerful, continuous music, but also with mischievous (and injury-prone) characters engaging in slapstick antics – themselves augmented by additional animation (and still drawings and what resembles stop-motion) and other stylization. Plus, the interactions are absurd, fanciful, and incorporate visual gags that don’t require any sort of communication (mugging to the camera or grunting various sounds are the preferred choices), rendering the film essentially silent. Its aim appears also to merge Chaplinesque gimmicks into the shenanigans (as well as those of Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, and Benny Hill).

Written and directed by Mike Cheslik, this unusual experiment in exaggerated lunacy is essentially a one-man show, crafted from a shoestring budget. Though the initial conceit is singular and creative, it does resort quite a bit to repetition; the simplistic, cartoonish misadventures utilize loopy hallucinations, woven critters, flashes of exclamative graphics, video game imagery (along with missions/accomplishments and the accrual of coins), larger-than-life personas (from veteran trappers to a seductive furrier [Olivia Graves]), overblown sound effects, brief moments of crudeness, and more, though it’s overflowing with reused gags that are momentarily clever but wear thin when shown over and over again (this includes musical motifs, which are comparable to primitive computer games). At times, it’s even monotonous. Nevertheless, there’s a certain charm to the goofiness on display, especially when it’s not repeated.

Of most significance in this film’s visual style, however, are the costumes, which are of the Halloween shop variety. Extras don full-body animal costumes to depict the various rodents and canines; nearly every creature is a person in a suit. This makes the action sequences, the various confrontations, and the frenzied violence quite comical; the concepts here, chiefly in their executions, are incredibly bizarre and uproariously funny. The subject matter, the primary instrument for humor, and the plot probably would have worked better as a short film (many of the notions almost certainly started that way), but the end result is still a testament to what can be accomplished in a feature length format when inventive ideas triumph over financial restrictions. There’s a considerable amount of silliness at every turn, oftentimes succumbing to excessive repetition that stifles the quality of laughs, but it’s frequently amusing and, intermittently, colossally stupid. Unfortunately, it goes on for too long, unable to keep up the momentum of its unexpected uniqueness, even with the complications of a hysterical trial and the epic, brutal, bloodthirsty final face-off with hundreds of vengeful beavers.

– Mike Massie