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HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS
80 Plays5 months ago
With studios less sure how to reach audiences by the day, only one film has the answer to what people truly want: HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. In the newest movie from Mike Cheslik and the team behind Lake Michigan Monster bring us a new descent into whimsy and madness in a film so ridiculous, we're convinced it stars Cody. Join Mike and Jamie as they talk about this delirious swirl of live action cartoon, silent(ish) movie, harrowing survival tale, XXX-ed jugs ,and 16-bit farming sim (not kidding), HUB might be the most creative movie of the year, the funniest movie were seen in ages, and without a doubt the best movie ever made on the subject of man's battle against mascot suits.
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Transcript
Introduction & Film Setup
00:00:06
Speaker
um
00:00:15
Speaker
for know I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
00:00:28
Speaker
through thee Look in the box office poll for one stop podcasts for beavers, beavers, and beavers. I'm Mike, joined as always by Jamie. I was hoping you would just yell beavers as well. ah no yeah Now we have to restart. but back contain all Then you just say beavers but in Latin and backwards. srev vep Anyway, we're here to talk about hundreds of beavers, which is I believe out now in UK and Irish cinemas, and is released by Lightbulb Film Distribution.
The Plot of 'Hundreds of Beavers'
00:01:01
Speaker
This is the same team that brought us the ever-wonderful Lake Michigan Monster.
00:01:05
Speaker
And can I just start by saying how perverse it is that we're spending this evening talking about hundreds of beavers without Cody, who may or may not be the star of this movie? Well, that's the thing. Cody's not here. Cody's not here with us, because I assume the plot of the movie is happening to him right now, wherever he is. Hundreds of beavers is so Cody-core. It has the constant threat of getting a nail-like object through the foot. yeah it It has the nail question, Cody's favorite movie convention. ah It's like it was filmed to make him happy. I i said this joke earlier, which is this movie is ah a joke we would make during like year eight of our Inception commentary track, Inception
Film's Unique Style and Humor
00:01:54
Speaker
commentaries, if we kept doing that and we did we stopped because of the insanity we were putting ourselves through.
00:02:01
Speaker
Well, I'm pretty sure we have made the joke of co Cody having to choose between a ball of beaver pelts and a big jug with three X's on it. As soon as Applejack showed up, it was like Cody. This is Cody. This is Cody's ideal fucking life is this. And Cody's ideal fucking life would be ruined by beavers. I don't even know what to say about this movie other than just, just watch it. It's, it's delightful. It's, it's everything you would want out of a motion picture experience. We were saying in our group chat earlier that this should have been nominated for Best Picture, and it's only half a joke. This movie is operating on so many cylinders at once, with the most basic premise in the world. Drunk guy is in woods. Must survive.
00:02:51
Speaker
I want to read like the actual like synopsis of this because it's fucking wonderful. A drunken Applejack salesman and diabolical beavers, hundreds of them who stand between him and survival. What's great is that's literally the plot of the movie. like that's not even That's not even a joke description. That's just the beautiful, perfect plot of the movie. A plot that should not have layers to it with that premise, but... The beavers are set up throughout this plotline better than most comic book villains, which is why the thing that shocked me most about this movie with that premise and looking at the trailer, you assume, okay, obviously this movie is going to be one scene of this dude beating the shit out of beavers after another. That comes, but not until the third act.
00:03:44
Speaker
and The majority of this movie is if somebody took a playthrough of the Oregon Trail, then filmed it as a silent film with a bunch of Looney Tunes jokes in in there. and Those three things don't go together, but here they do. And it's only a silent film sometimes when it wants to be. Which I think is a like good summation for the energy this movie has, which is just when someone goes to talk and no words come out and the reply is, pardon? Because you, for the last hour and 40 minutes, have just been under the assumption that this is entirely a silent film. But no, that's part of the joke too, because this is this is beyond Looney Tunes logic. This is, I cannot believe this movie exists.
00:04:34
Speaker
it like It is the best live-action Looney Tunes movie of all the time. I don't know how you achieve like that level of manic cartoon energy and actually make it work. That never stops. It never relents. I personally think that the runtime goes on a little bit longer than it needs to, but pacing wise, this movie starts at maximum jokes and never ever ever lets up. It just keeps escalating to the point where you assume it's going to become like blazing saddles and they're just going to burst out of the screen and attack the audience.
00:05:16
Speaker
and And that's the thing about the runtime. I could not imagine cutting anything out. I would just like, if I could go into the editing room and be like, can you just like increase the tempo by a little bit? And just use that to shave like five minutes off. Don't cut anything out. It's perfect. Just up the tempo a little bit, which only makes it more manic. And it's the it's the cartoon logic you see the character utilize throughout the film that fucking destroys me. It's the It's the only movie I've seen, it's it's actually the only live action thing I've seen that gets the cartoon a rabbit hole where you pop in one and pop out the other, and for some reason isn't overly ridiculous.
Video Game Influences and Humor
00:05:54
Speaker
But you see him work out like, oh, I can put a rock over this one and a rock over this one, and then the rabbit will pop out over here and then I can kill him.
00:06:02
Speaker
This movie weirdly has the same d DNA as a Riddick, where- Oh my god, it does. There's so much of the plot. You are just watching a dude figure out the logic of an alien world he has been dropped into, just trying to survive. Because the movie and That does not follow many rules, but the one it does stick to is for virtually every scenario, you are going to be treated to the same thing multiple times as you watch this character fail at something over and over and over, trying it different each time. And it's failing a slightly different time each way, like an FMV game. Yes, very much so. i keep I keep harping on video games in this because like this video game and it uses video games like logic and energy. This is one of the best uses of video game thinking I've ever seen in a medium outside of video game. The plot for the majority of the movie is driven by the hero trying to get enough trying to get enough animal pelts to buy more and more expensive items at a shopkeeper. The final item being an engagement ring, which god damn if that does not immediately give you star du Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon flashbacks.
00:07:36
Speaker
That's the thing, like, but the first time he goes to the shop, they actually do the video game selection screen, whatever they cut to the, um, the signage, and that's when, like, the movie clicked for me, like, oh, we're watching a Looney Tunes-inspired, like, top-of-down Minecraft survival game, but it's a movie. All of those things together should not fucking work. Like, hey, this is 12 days to die, but with beavers. it's It's like all the animals being people in costumes, which you think would, like, wear itself out very quickly, but becomes so much of, like, the language of the jokes that it kind of blends into everything at a certain point. Like, so much so when they, like, up the joke by having the horse and then the dude's face is just visible.
00:08:25
Speaker
the whole I think this is the only time I've ever seen somebody do a one-man a horse costume that still has to function as a horse. Because at that point, you're just curious to see how physically this is going to work. That looks so painful. You know, he looked like um one of the wheelers from Return to Oz. That's what he looked like walking around. Like, this is a joke for Mike and like three other people out there, but doesn't it seem like a joke from the goes wrong show? All right, I guess I have to mount the horse now. Oh, you gotta watch season two of that. Um, that like all that aside, I think what is like, cause we could talk about like that, what's happening in the movie all fucking day. And it is funny, but we'll just be like, it's the ending of pineapple
Craftsmanship and Absurdity
00:09:12
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express at that point. I think it's just really impressive, not to like get heady or up our own ass talking about,
00:09:19
Speaker
I'm not gonna do film analysis on hundreds of beavers or something, but I think it's worth talking about the craftsmanship of the movie from this team and like the style of movie they're able to do and that they excel at, that they have really perfected with this. I don't know even the next step after hundreds of beavers at this point. But I don't think there's anyone else on the planet who could ever pull off a movie of this particular style. There's so many different specificities of batshit insanity that are happening at one time, on screen, every scene. I remember I was texting you earlier today, like, the closest thing I could possibly compare this to is Saul of the Moleman. Yes. When a mecha beaver showed up, I really thought of Saul and the Moleman.
00:10:07
Speaker
Like if if a Lake Michigan Monster was a live-action Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, this has super that era Adult Swim energy. But if creators like that had been left in a vacuum to just perfect that kind of weird, intentionally cartoony fake mascot humor, it's a very specific type of humor you don't see very often. mascot humor. I like that. I wonder if they were they were like fans of Saul the Moleman at all. There's some of us. There's at least like 20 of us. Johnny Tambourine heads out there.
00:10:46
Speaker
ah It's like I'm taken by like the filmic style of it being a silent film it being in black and white then there's like the mixing of like green screen and like actual locations there's the going back and forth between like more expensive looking effects and then purposely like cheap effects like it's at some point you just get like like a beaver like kicks his ass and it's just it's pretty much just a fucking lot of clothes he's like the beavers throwing around occasionally the beavers bleed stuffing like it's the puppet episode of angel just excelsior or just like flying out of
00:11:27
Speaker
They're like the bit that fucking killed me. Once again, just talking about a joke is he opens a beaver suit, which you just see him fucking open like it's just a normal suit and he pulls out a plastic skeleton. It's a human skeleton. Like, the levels of joke that's going on there. It's hitting, like, the particular kind of ridiculous that plays, I think, to people like us and people from our specific generation. Like, it's it's the kind of humor that is both calling attention to itself but not saying anything simultaneously. Like, look at how stupid this is while we're not telling you how stupid this is.
00:12:06
Speaker
Oh, again, to compare it to just all of them old men, what I always loved about that show was there weren't really that many jokes on that show because they had the confidence that the fact that this show exists. is funny enough. and And hundreds of beavers has that, I feel. Like, there's a lot of stretches where there's not necessarily gags happening. They are content with the sheer absurdity of, wow, he's been running on these logs for about 10 minutes now. Okay.
00:12:43
Speaker
fucking Matrix Reloaded level chase scene between Man and Beaver that I think is the entire second act of this. yeah It's like when he's going around the Beaver Dam at the end, which is just built up so beautifully, it's like fucking Red Skull's castle. And the things he's coming across, the movie doesn't stop to go, haha, joke. It's so fucking weird, and there's so much escalation to the the absurdity of what he's coming across, that he's not even really reacting to, and that's the joke.
00:13:19
Speaker
And the pure normalcy that so much of this is treated, like the fucking um Sherlock and Watson beavers that are seen throughout the film that are tracking him and putting the clues together as he attempts to kill beavers. Which should, like again, any other comedy would just be a one-off joke because, well, that's not funny a second time. It is whenever, from that point on, there's just two detectives chasing our hero and it's a it's a beaver Sherlock and Watson. And it turns out they're in their own movie, and he's the main villain of their movie. And it has extra payoffs! Like, I'm- I'm- Like, so they're interrogating him, and they have the evidence that the Sherlock and Watson have collected, and it's all of the- the corpse lines that he has left behind, and they have somehow built this up into him, like, doing some sort of Joseph Mangala experiment on beavers? One of which I think was trying to create, like, a robot beaver or something? Something like that. It's how is there extra jokes for something that should have stopped being funny three repetitions ago? I think that's the core of this movie is the absurdity of how far you can stretch such a simple premise that you refuse to embellish in any way. There's like no world building or anything of like what's going on. You're just thrown into like whatever world this is and whatever like weird ass character Applejack is. That's what he is for me forever. He's Applejack.
00:14:53
Speaker
just, okay, he has enough beaver pellets to get the bear trap. Now we sit down for 15 minutes of bear trap jukes. So by the way the only time I've ever seen someone try to use a bear trap as a fucking grappling hook. That wasn't well then that was awesome. That was fucking awesome. Him immediately fucking up the bear trap and then having to utilize it in different ways because he's not good at bear traps. there's ah There's a sequence in this movie of a character realizing he can't use the item he bought for its intended purposes, but he can trade that item for a similar item he saw a character use earlier for a different purpose, but maybe he can use it ah to yeah as the ah hatchet it's shaped like instead of the pipe that was being used. And again, we're just in a fucking Sierra game.
00:15:46
Speaker
And again, there doesn't have to be a joke on top of that because the fact that this is what we're doing and this is the language we're speaking in this movie is funny enough by itself. and this this It's just the fact it's happening. It's happening and that's why it's funny. Which is such like an underrated form of humor. It's this shit that I loved growing up whenever I was like watching Conan shit. Because so much of Conan's humor was, like, just the fact we are actually fucking doing this is why it's funny. No, we are going to take Mike Sweeney and put him on a toilet, mounted to the hood of a car, and drive him around the suburbs. We don't care if you laugh at it.
00:16:28
Speaker
Why is the coked up werewolf funny? Because the words coked up werewolf. That's it. That's the entirety of the joke. Cactus shift playing we didn't start the fire on a flute. That's the kind of energy hundreds of viewers
Emotional Depth Amidst Chaos
00:16:40
Speaker
has. And that should make the movie too farcical to have any kind of real engagement with other than to see what crazy place it goes to next. But but like Lake Michigan monster, it surprises you with how well written, the ah the beats it chooses to linger on are like it's able to um establish an emotion, an emotional link with the main character in the most ludicrous story imaginable just through just through the sheer bonding power of adversity. Yes. It is impossible to watch this dude try to try to do literally anything and be met with failure over and over and over again and not cheer for him whenever he finally eats a goddamn meal.
00:17:32
Speaker
You're so inadeared to Jean Kayak. Like, by the like no, you want him to kill those fucking beavers. You you want him to win a marriage by killing hundreds of beavers. Which, what a glorious moment that is when we finally get the title card like an hour and 15 minutes into the film. but Again, this movie is so playful, it has to fuck with credits. is it still waits like 35 minutes for the opening credits and then teases the title until you think you just missed it and then drops it near the end. You also get two different opening credits sequences. One comes halfway through the film because now he's a different character with a different with a different career. And I have that Applejack song stuck in my head now.
00:18:22
Speaker
And it's going to become the box office pulp drinking song now. I really want to get these guys on to talk to them. Nothing would make me... I want to do a commentary for this movie with them. I just want to pick their brains the entire time. And I want to do with the Chris Farley show with these guys. I want to just explain the scenes they made back to them and tell them it was funny. ah how did How did you get that corkscrew effect whenever he he came out of the snow? How did you get that corkscrew effect when he came out of the snow a second time? I really want a like sound board of like all the various sound effects this movie uses. Like, just Jean's screaming whenever he steps on a pine cone. Like, I want that as a ah that is my like text tone anytime someone texts me. Cody, specifically. Did you freak you out whenever he got a beard? He looked exactly like Cody with a beard.
00:19:10
Speaker
yeah yeah Yes, yes. I know it's old hat we make these jokes about Cody, but no, literally, I feel like we could sue because of how much of a Cody joke this is. He's expressive in the way Cody is and in his party photos. in his party photos. he's he's He has used several of Cody's careers. I assume Cody's been a fur trapper at some point. He was a laser engraver for a while. In that time Cody laser engraved his own image onto a ah pool cue.
00:19:41
Speaker
Oh yeah, there there's a pool queue out there that has Cody waving to you. And that person does not know it. Also I'm saying this as I go into our group chat and look at the photos from Cody's hundreds of beavers viewing party. He had at his apartment a few weeks back where he made his own coonskin cat with the Lexus on it and served Swedish fish.
Cody's Themed Viewing Party
00:20:01
Speaker
Look, we're saying this because if you're listening, everyone who was a part of the production of Hundreds of Beavers, if you would like to talk to us about Cody's be hundreds of beavers party and his menu, we would like to have you on the show. I would just like to read Cody's hundreds of beavers drinking game menu. Drink any time. All murder is investigated. Buzzy innards are exposed. Tobacco is used in any form.
00:20:27
Speaker
Wolves attack! A nuclear explosion goes off! Or Jean Kayak falls in a hole. He was very proud of that one. Oh, he provided an Acme, Apple, Highball, Gin, Apple Juice, s Lemon Juice, Maple Syrup, and Soda Water. So we we have a bobtail for tonight. Yes! yeah I believe Cody's taking this party on the road. I think he'll be loading up an ah RV and going around to all the towns, and we'll be doing children's birthday parties in the style of hundreds of beefers. He did say he was going to show this to a group in California next week, so Cody is our own personal Johnny Appleseed. Yeah, or I guess more and maybe towards the people who actually made the film. He's more of like the Randall flag like he's rogue, but he's spreading their message. This is the only time I've ever compared Cody to Randall flag because I actually think it kind of goes together. Oh, Cody does have that base and the city of sin. I just really like the idea of Cody calling himself the walking dude.
00:21:27
Speaker
That just, that really elicits joy in me. Anyway. Look out for my Captain Trips! Boo! So we don't want to spoil too much, so we'll just say, fucking see hundreds of beavers. God damn it. Just, it's awesome. I know we don't even usually do, like, go see a movie at the end of, like, these discussions, but seriously, see hundreds of beavers. If it doesn't seem like it's your kind of movie, it is. You just don't know it yet. Feel free to put that threat on the poster. But for Box Office Pulp, you can, of course, subscribe to us in all the fine places. You can find a podcast, write and review us in any of those fine places. ah You can follow us
00:21:59
Speaker
on us you can follow along with us on social media at box office pulp and pretty much most places and Anything else Jamie not not to spoil any more jokes from this movie But I do want to say Building an ice toilet and then putting a bear trap inside is the evilest thing I've ever seen in film I'm just laughing hysterically like a supervillain as he does it ah That is some beyond a jigsaw shit. I'm sad we didn't see aftermath of that. I do appreciate any time the beavers stop to shit in one of his traps, they utilize toilet paper. And they're civilized. Of course, you can always trust a beaver, except to build a nuclear powered spaceship apparently. Anyway, you can also find us at boxofficebulb.com. Get the hell out of here. And like that, he's gone.
Podcast Wrap-up & Zencaster Promo
00:22:55
Speaker
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00:23:40
Speaker
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