Listening to an installment of the Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome podcast recently, I was intrigued enough by one host’s excitement about this movie to spend a couple of hours with it over the weekend.

I’m still not sure what exactly in the world I watched.

Hundreds of Beavers is an absolute fever dream of a comedy, I know that much.

The late, great Terry Jones of the Monty Python troupe once lamented that their goal had been “to be unquantifiable,” but the word “Pythonesque” having been added to the Oxford English Dictionary shows how utterly they failed at that.

I think if he’d been able to see this movie, and someone told him it was Pythonesque, he’d ponder that for a moment and then say something along the lines of, “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.”

There’s no chance I could do justice to a summary of the plot, because the plot is absolutely bonkers. Mind you, it isn’t really all that important. It’s simply a vehicle for delivering a dizzying array of sight gags, running jokes, surreal visuals, a variety of mascot costumes, gross-out humor, extreme cartoon-y violence, and a scene featuring a stripper pole.

Among other things.

I can describe it best as a feature-length black-and-white Looney Tunes film but in live-action and including a lot of stuff the Merrie Melodies people could never have gotten away with. The presentation is that of a silent movie, complete with the occasional dialog card, though it’s not truly silent because the characters all make noises along the way, usually monosyllabic “Huh?” and “Gaah!” and such, though occasionally actual words come through. It’s… weird. This is one of the internal rules that was made to be broken, or at least regularly bent.

The pacing of this thing is mindblowing. Not one frame is wasted. The quiet moments exist primarily in order to make sure a comedy beat lands on target. It’s always, always, moving on to the next bit, which is itself probably an iteration on a bit from before but with a tweak, a shift, a surprise, or whatever. The moment you think you know what’s going to happen next, whoops, you just fell through a hole in the snow.

It is internally consistent in its own weird way, though. This is a comedy which excels at subverting expectations, but you can’t do that unless you establish those expectations correctly. So, yes, rarely does a moment pay off the way you expect… but as soon as you see the payoff you go, “Ha! I should’ve known.” Which is funny because it’s rare that you can predict what’s going to actually happen next at any moment in this movie. The phrase, “A wild ride from start to finish” was almost tailor-made to fit this experience.

I expect that comedy writers are going to dissect the craft of Hundreds of Beavers the way that The Furrier dissects the various “animals” that Jean Kayak brings to her. This thing is meticulously assembled, poop jokes and all.

So, do I recommend it? Yes… with the caveat that there’s a non-zero amount of gross-out humor in here, enough that if I’d known about all of it going in I might have passed the movie by after all. I’m glad I didn’t, but… there are some moments I could’ve gone my life without seeing. If your stomach’s stronger than mine then I wholeheartedly suggest you check it out.

Also, they pull a Jeremiah Johnson meme image joke, and that earns it points all by itself. Plus bonus points for this lovely poster which puts me in mind of the screwball comedies I grew up with in the ’80s.

Look at that! I love it. You just don’t get many posters in that style anymore.