Tag Archives: Black and White

51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

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 “We had the spirit of Jean Nicolet and Werner Herzog with us as we were attempting to make the greatest Wisconsin film of all time. Hopefully.” ― Mike Cheslik

 DIRECTED BY: Mike Cheslik                                                                                      

FEATURING: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico, Wes Tank

PLOT: Following the destruction of his home and factory, applejack purveyor Jean Kayak attempts, and fails, to outwit a variety of woodland creatures in his quest to find food and shelter. Thanks to the tutelage of a master trapper, he learns the fur trade, and his exploits catch the eye of a pretty furrier; however, her merchant father demands that he bring in hundreds of dead beavers to obtain her hand in marriage. Jean sets out to fulfill this request – under the watchful eye of a pair of bucktoothed detectives – whereupon he stumbles upon a massive supervillainous plot.

Still from Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

BACKGROUND:

  • High school best friends Cheslik and Tews worked together previously on Apocrypha candidate Lake Michigan Monster. The idea for Hundreds of Beavers was concocted at a bar during the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, where Lake Michigan Monster was screening.
  • The film was shot near small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan over the course of 12 weeks, spread across two winters in 2019 and 2020.
  • Some of the cast have found fame outside of film acting. Graves (the Furrier) has earned renown under the name The Witch of Wonderlust as a folk magician, travel blogger, and pole dancing instructor (the latter talent of which she demonstrates to great effect in a surprising moment in the film), while Tank (the Master Trapper) gained viral fame for his mid-pandemic video series featuring rap performances of Dr. Seuss books.
  • Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood put the total budget at $150,000, with a full $10,000 allotted to the purchase of the mascot costumes. All told, the filmmakers purchased 6 beavers, 5 dogs, 2 rabbits, one raccoon, one wolf and one skunk. (The horse costume, such as it is, is bespoke.) The vast number of woodland creatures on screen at any given time were courtesy of the film’s 1,500 visual effects, all composed in Adobe After Effects.
  • Recognizing that selling the film to a traditional distributor would likely result in a cursory release before being dumped on video, the producers retained the exhibition rights and commenced a roadshow tour of festivals across North America, complete with live wrestling battles between Tews and a beaver mascot. They report that more than half of the $500,000 in box office receipts came after the film became available through video-on-demand.
  • The film’s poster is modeled after the one-sheet for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
  • Named to multiple “Best of 2024” lists, including the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. The movie took the prize for Best Narrative Film at the Kansas International Film Festival, while Cheslik was named Best Director at the 2023 Phoenix Film Festival. The film also claimed both of those awards at that year’s Wyoming Film Festival.
  • The consensus pick by the writers of this site as the Best Weird Movie of 2024.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: From start to finish, Hundreds of Beavers is almost nothing but indelible images. After the zany animated prologue, there’s the silly running gag of surprise holes in the ice that turn out to be integral to the plot; every single appearance of an animal costume, including gay rabbits, overfed raccoons, and dogs playing poker; mascot guts; ice pond pinball; and so many groups of beavers that take the form of construction crews, a police force, and even a jury. There are no wrong answers. But nothing sums it all up quite like the sight of Jean Kayak on the run from the eponymous horde, his absurd raccoon hat flying off his head while innumerable human-sized Castor canadensis give chase. It’s an intentional borrow from Buster Keaton, solidifying the connection with the glory days of silent comedy and making good on the promise of the provocative title.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: The unhittable spittoon; Elementary, my dear Beaver

 WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: For a film that looks and feels like it should be a two-reeler from a hundred years ago, Hundreds of Beavers pulls off the astounding trick of using current-day, commercially available technology to assemble vintage styles and hoary-chestnut jokes into something new and entirely unexpected. Between Cheslik’s endlessly inventive microbudget solutions that result in an action film to rival a Fast and Furious entry (at .03% of the bankroll) and Tews’ gloriously full-bodied, rubber-faced performance, the elements are in place to build a tale of ever-escalating silliness and absurdity. Most of the time, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen next, and even in those moments where you might anticipate what is to come, it is accomplished with grin-inducing surprise and wit.

Trailer for Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

COMMENTS: Jean Kayak’s applejack distillery is called “Acme.” That Continue reading 51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HAPPY END (1967)

Šťastný konec

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Vladimír Menšík, Jaroslava Obermaierová, Josef Abrhám

PLOT: Chronicling the life of one Bedřich Frydrych (Menšík), a butcher and wife-murderer, from birth to death; in this cas, everything is reversed: his “birth” starts at his execution and his “happy end” comes at infancy.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: While it’s all light and very funny, deeper and darker meanings lurk under the surface; the hero found guilty and sentenced to life—literally, in this case.

COMMENTS: “You lie down in the bed you make.” This famous epigram opens the film after the credits, all superimposed over the opening image, a close-up of our lead character, seemingly sleeping. Then a pair of hands grasps the head and what we thought was a sleeping man turns out to be a decapitated head, fresh from the guillotine. But far from being the end of the story, this turns out to be the beginning. Frydrych narrates, in the fashion of David Copperfield, his “birth,” as his head is joined to his body, now intact as the guillotine blade moves up, and he is welcomed into the world.

The central gimmick of Happy End—a narrative where the action is reversed—is more commonplace to audiences now than at the time of its production. We’ve seen works such as ‘s Memento and Tenet, Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” Gaspar Noé‘s Irréversible, and Martin Amis’ novel “Time’s Arrow,” to name a few. But just because a gimmick is familiar doesn’t guarantee that it’s executed skillfully.

Happy End benefits from several assets: a short running time (barely over 70 minutes); a clever script by Lipsky and his collaborator Miloš Macourek, and a talented pool of actors, especially Vladimír Menšík in a rare leading role 1, and he’s perfect as a murderer who is also a sort of low-rent Candide navigating his way through life.

Considered conventionally, the story is a melodrama set in the early 1900s telling the sordid tale of Bedřich Frydrych meeting young Julia (Obermaierová), whom he’ll eventually marry and eventually murder, along with her adulterous lover, Jenick (Abrhám), leading to his execution. But in this iteration, with things reversed, Frydrych is birthed and “schooled,” whereupon he enters society and is provided with a wife whom he assembles from parts stashed in a suitcase. Marital life starts out rocky when an ambulance deposits Jenick on the street, whereupon he flies up to the apartment through the window (leading to Frydrych’s nickname for him, “Mr. Birdy”). From that point on, it’s a hard life as Frydrych attempts to rid himself of Julia and Jenick to get to his own happy end.

It’s a neat trick, but even more impressive when considering that the narrative works in either direction; as told here, Happy End subverts what would be a tale of tragedy into a tale of triumph. Frydrych is still a murderer, of sorts. His “final” meeting with Jenick is taking him into the water and leaving him there, thereby getting him out of his and Julia’s lives. In conventional time, this is their first meeting; Frydrych saves him from drowning, and thereafter Jenick develops an interest in Julia. Similarly, Frydrych and Julia’s ‘first’ meeting turns into an act of creation, rather than the grisly destructive dismemberment it would normally be. Even the wordplay is subverted, as exchanges take on different meanings: “Only those who repent can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “That would take a very long time…”; “You’ll meet your Lord soon.” “That’s disgusting!”

The UK label Second Run premiered Happy End as an all-region Blu-ray in 2024, after its 4K restoration from the Czech National Film Archive. Along with a booklet essay by film researcher Jonathan Owen, the release includes a 30 minute video essay by film critic Cerise Howard and an episode of The Projection Booth Podcast with Mike White, Kat Ellinger and Ben Buckingham serves as commentary.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as conceptually and formally radical, and virtuosic, as any helmed by the New Wave’s celebrated, most outré directors – your Chytilovás, Němeces, Jakubiskos, Juráčeks, et al.”–Cerise Howard, Senses of Cinema

  1. Menšík is a recurring face in Czech cinema of the 1960s, a Czech “that guy” character actor glimpsed in The Cassandra Cat, The Cremator, and Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up And Scald Myself With Tea, among others. ↩︎

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)

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DIRECTED BY: Wolf Rilla

FEATURING: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Martin Stephens

PLOT: All the women of child-bearing age in the Midwich  become pregnant after a mysterious period of unconsciousness; their offspring have a distinctive appearance, mature rapidly, and behave in a manner quite unnatural.

Still from village of the damned (1960)

COMMENTS: For two years running, I have celebrated Halloween here with a classic 1950s goofballmonster showcase. So here we are, on the cusp of the 60s, and lots of things look familiar: we’re back in black-and-white, we’re back in England, and something is once more out to get us. But it’s a little different this time. This time, the beasts aren’t strabismus-afflicted giant birds or giddily bouncing brains. They’re children, notable for their platinum hair, their glowing eyes, and their sociopathic behavior. This time, our monster feels earnestly threatening.

We don’t get to them right away, though. The film cleverly serves up its surprises and horrors at a deliberate pace. We must first work through the mystery of the lengthy period of unconsciousness, which the authorities investigate seriously and thoroughly, diligently working through experiments that culminate in a terrible sacrifice. We never get a full explanation for that occurrence, though, because we’re quickly on to the conundrum of the many immaculate conceptions and the havoc they wreak among the populace. In fact, we’re well into Act 2 before we get our first encounter with the enigma of the curious children themselves, who can solve puzzle boxes as toddlers and who get revenge upon their mothers when the feeding bottle is too hot. (The filmmakers were right to forego the original title of John Wyndham’s book; “The Midwich Cuckoos” would have been too much of a giveaway as to the childrens’ origin.) This sense of compounding catastrophes keeps you off-balance like the residents of Midwich, never able to relax before the next dilemma arrives.

The children are appropriately creepy. Lead child David (Stephens, unconvincingly dubbed) does most of the talking, serving up uncomfortable sociopathy by directly confronting the shopkeepers who think them an abomination, or helpfully suggesting to his father that, “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings… you could be as powerful as we are.” However, the young terrors do most of their intimidation without words. A walk through the town shows the residents in a mixed state of fear and revulsion, responding to the cliquish collection of quiet children as if they were a rowdy biker gang. Luckily, all they need to do is put on their best wish-you-to-the-cornfield look  and the townspeople’s reactions do the rest. They come by their fears honestly, because we’ve seen that the children’s disapproval carries with it the threat of death. This is most evident in Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)