Hundreds of Beavers (4/5)

Hundred of Beavers was written by Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (you don’t know them) sometime around 2018. It was shot over the winter of 2019-2020 in Wisconsin with a crew of six. Mike Cheslik directed and Ryland Tews starred. The movie was edited by Mike Cheslik for two years using mainly Adobe After Effects ($22.99/month subscription). The total budget was $150,000. The movie premiered at the Fantastic Fest in 2022, which is a film festival in Austin, TX, that is not SXSW. From there, it hopped from film festival to film festival in 2023. It was released on streaming in April 2024. A select few theaters in NYC showed it for a couple of weeks.

The above storyline you should find intriguing. Because a film made by nobody and coming from nowhere usually doesn’t eventually get to a wide distribution. What usually happens if the movie is bad or even mediocre is that it dies a quiet death before anyone who doesn’t regularly attend film festivals even hears of it. But here “Hundreds of Beavers” is, and it is possible that you can see it. You probably should, simply because it exists and there is nothing else much like it.

Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick comedy about an apple cider brewer named Jean Kayak that loses his apple groves and applejack liquor business in a catastrophic instance of beaver sabotage. He wakes up in the middle of a snowy winter with nothing and spends the first third of the movie just trying to survive in the wilderness. The movie is in black and white (not deliberate, just cheaper to edit and create special effects) and lacks dialogue (deliberate for purposes of humor). Jean Kayak’s attempts to feed himself resemble the plot of an extended Wile E. Coyote cartoon. He concocts elaborate plans and traps to snare his dinner, rabbits and beavers, which routinely veer off into bizarre and humorous outcomes. The movie employs human actors for all parts, even the rabbits and beavers are played by humans in rabbits and beavers costumes. But beyond that, it is hard to tell what in-frame is real and what is an aftereffect. For practical purposes, the movie may be categorized better as animated.

The second third of the movie plays like a video game in which Jean Kayak reinvents himself as a fur trapper and starts concocting elaborate schemes to kill beavers and sell their pelts to the local merchant in exchange for increasingly valuable prizes (the most valuable of which being the hand of his daughter in marriage, worth "hundreds of beavers"). This part of the movie gets a little tedious, not necessarily because any one part of it is not funny, but because there are too many separate parts. After all, the perfect length of a Looney Tunes cartoon is about five minutes long. This movie is 108 minutes. You can only take so much of this type of fast-paced humor before being gassed. I'm not sure what part should have been cut, but its about 18 minutes too long.

But in the third third, well, that is where the movie truly gets special. For the beavers aren’t just ordinary beavers. They have been chewing through the forest in order to gather enough logs to build something extraordinary on the lake. Indeed, what exactly they are building argues that Jean Kayak’s increasingly systematic harvesting of their pelts amounts to something close to a murderous rampage, if not an outright genocide. When Jean Kayak is Beaver captured, he is even given a Beaver trial and provided a Beaver lawyer. This Beaver society has the rule of law.

There are some truly ingenious scenarios and setups in this movie. The opening song is a lot of fun. The hunting party and the wolves that follow it provide amusing horror/suspense. The merchant’s daughter is a good pole dancer. And I happen to think that men in big beaver costumes are inherently funny, especially so when they are fighting. I eagerly anticipate what Cheslik and Tews could do with a budget. Someone should give them a bunch of money so we can all find out.

I think this movie would make a great double feature with Avatar. Avatar is one of the most expensive movies ever, made by as high-profile of creators as you can get, and has such a self-serious pro-nature bent that it is technically anti-human. Whereas Hundreds of Beavers couldn’t be cheaper, is made by nobodies and is unapologetically, perhaps even unethically, pro-human. The latter would be a great antidote to the former.

Road House (2024) (3/5 Stars)

They have remade "Road House" the 1989 classic action-comedy starring Patrick Swayze. This gives me another excuse to talk about Roger Ebert, whose review of the same I am incorporating entirely at the bottom of this review. I have read at least a thousand of Roger's reviews. His review of Road House is arguably his best one. I share this review more than I share any other of Roger's reviews. On the "Road House" DVD, one of the audio commentaries is done by superfan Kevin Smith (Clerks) who takes the time to bring up and read the entirety of Roger's review during the movie. In the history of DVD audio commentaries (as far as I know) it has only happened once that a movie review is recited for the record, and that was Roger's review of Road House.

It is notable that Roger didn't think the movie was good, but this only proves one of his better philosophies: that it isn't the reviewer’s job to get it right, that is to correctly judge whether a movie is "good" or "bad". (thumbs notwithstanding, Roger would always direct his audience to his writing column for his full opinion. He reviewed far more movies in writing than on his TV show.) No, the job of a reviewer is to describe the movie accurately. This is the only way a reviewer can be helpful because different people want to and like to see different types of movies. Now, with that idea in mind, I suggest you peruse Roger's review. By the end of it, I guarantee that you will have a pretty good idea as to whether or not you are the type of person who would want to see Road House (1989).

The remake of “Road House” has a decent enough pedigree on paper. Doug Liman (Swingers, Edge of Tomorrow) is directing. Jake Gyllenhaal has replaced Patrick Swayze as Dalton. Billy Magnussen is the lead bad guy and Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter, is a crazy henchman. But producing a remake, particularly a remake of an already perfect movie like Road House (1989), is tricky. After all, if the original movie is great, why remake it? Why not just watch the original. Case in point: West Side Story (1961) and West Side Story (2021).

A remake only makes sense when the original movie is good with room to improve, is hampered by a lack of budget/outdated technology, or has a cultural barrier like a foreign language. Great remakes include Scarface (1933) and Scarface (1983), Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Minus One (2023). Scarface is a good example of an update in time and place, taking a 1920s Italian immigrant smuggling booze in NYC and replacing it with a 1980s Mariel Boatlift immigrant smuggling cocaine in Miami. Ocean’s Eleven is a good example of taking an ordinary heist plot and adding on lots of intricacies and smooth editing. Godzilla Minus One is arguably the best remake I have seen, introducing a superior drama as well as 21st century special effects to a B-movie that utilized men in godzilla suits.

What I am saying is that doing the same thing in a remake doesn’t make sense. Something should change. The tricky part is deciding what should change when so much of the original movie worked. And Road House (2024) is a lesson in changing the wrong things.

The update in time and place is neutral. The original Road House took place in 1989 in Missouri. The new Road House takes place now in Florida. Whatever.

However, the biggest and most inexplicable change is the backstory of the main character, Dalton. In the original movie, Dalton is the world’s best bouncer. He gets head hunted by a corporate man who owns a bar that he wants to remodel and expand. Dalton doesn’t drink or smoke, starts his mornings with some half-naked Tai Chi (or something), and tells his subordinate bouncers to be nice to rowdy customers. In the remake, Dalton does not have this back story. In fact, he isn’t a professional bouncer at all. Instead, he is a UFC fighter that got blackballed from the sport because he killed an opponent in the ring with an illegal hit. The owner of the new Road House (Jessica Williams) hires Dalton not because she wants him to stop fights, but because she wants Dalton to win them.

The bad guys have changed too. In the original, the big bad guy, Brad Wesley, was a hedonist who threw extravagant Playboy style parties in his mansion (Seemingly financed all by shaking down local businesses, which as Roger Ebert accurately pointed out, seemed to be limited to three locations). Here the bad guys are young angry men on yachts engaged in the well-worn subplot of a real estate developer trying to force out the one last remaining business on the block so they can get on with their planned super-development. There also seems to be a drugs subplot, which would be in the running with the former for the most well-worn subplot in the history of movie subplots. The bad guys have a lot less fun than Brad Wesley did in the first movie. They have no women. There is no nudity.

That the bad guys are a lot less fun and that Dalton is unprofessional removes one of the elements that made the original Road House unique. How to put this? You see, Dalton (1989) works in a corporate capacity. His stated purpose is to help the owner’s business by calming down the joint so that patrons can feel safer and spend more money. Dalton is polite until he cannot be polite. He has a degree in philosophy. He’s monogamous. In other words, Dalton is a square and the original Road House (1989) is a conservative movie. Now, I say that even though the original movie is wall-to-wall sex and violence. But this is one of the things that movies can do. They can reinforce ideals in the good guys while simultaneously allowing a vicarious experience of the opposite through the bad guys. Road House (1989) allows the squares to have it both ways. The new Road House (2024) removes this guilty pleasure.

Instead, Dalton (2024) is but a reincarnation of John Wick and an endless multitude of other older violent vigilantes, a man who nominally wants to be peaceful but becomes super dangerous if angered enough. I don’t understand why that would be the change to be made in this remake. Road House (2024) has ditched the one thing that made the original unique and, in turn, has transformed this intellectual property into something you’ve already seen a bunch of times.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor. He has done fine work in a multitude of movies (Zodiac, Prisoners, Okja). Having said that, I don’t really buy him as an action star. Even with all the muscles. He does his best work as Emo (Donnie Darko, The Good Girl, Nocturnal Animals). I find it hard to believe that he could beat Conor McGregor in a fist-fight. Weird thing is, I don’t think he is necessarily miscast as Dalton, but I mean the 1989 Dalton that only drinks coffee and tries really hard to be polite. He is miscast as this Dalton, which tries to be the poor man's version of Liam Neeson and/or Keanu Reeves.

Also, where are all the fat men getting into fistfights like the original movie? And the good music? Or the G-String contest? Could we get at least one ridiculously large explosion of a barn? How about a shot of Jake Gyllenhaal’s ass (McGregor’s ass does not count)? You couldn’t fit the line “Pain Don’t Hurt” anywhere? And, and, and….

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Roger Ebert, May 19 1989

The guiding spirit of "Road House" can be glimpsed in one particular scene, which is set in the trophy room of an evil sadist who holds a helpless town in his iron grasp. His hunting trophies include not only the usual deer and elk and antelopes, but also orangutans, llamas and a matched set of tropical monkeys. This guy went hunting in the zoo.

We are expected to believe that the sadist financed these hunting expeditions by shaking down the businesmen in a town that, on the visible evidence, contains a bar, a general store, a Ford dealership and two residences. "Road House" is the kind of movie that leaves reality so far behind that you have to accept it on its own terms.

Was it intended as a parody? I have no idea, but I laughed more during this movie than during any of the so-called comedies I saw during the same week. Consider, for example, the movie's hero, a barroom bouncer named Dalton and played by Patrick Swayze (last seen in "Dirty Dancing"). Here is a man known as the best bouncer in the business - and the business must pay well, since he owns a Mercedes convertible. But he is not simply your average tough guy. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University and is capable of deep insights into his trade, such as, "In a fight, nobody wins." Dalton is summoned to a small Missouri town where the Double Deuce, the local nightclub, is terrorized nightly by the local goons and louts. His assignment: Bring peace to the bar so the owner can remodel and expand. His enemies: the hired guns of Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), the extortionist with the exotic trophy room. (Everyone in this movie has names out of a Western - not only Dalton and Brad Wesley, but also such characters as Wade Garrett, Doc, Emmet, and Cody. Doc is a girl, but never mind.) Dalton wades into the fray on opening night and finds himself in the middle of a fight in which the furnishings of the Double Deuce are reduced to matchsticks. Wounded by a knife cut, he goes to the hospital, where the gash is sewn closed by Doc (Kelly Lynch), a beautiful blond who is impressed by Dalton's doctorate in philosophy and his ability to withstand pain.

In no time at all, Dalton and Doc are making love on the porch roof outside Dalton's rented room - a roof that can clearly be seen by the evil Wesley, who once entertained hopes of becoming Doc's lover.

(These two houses, on either side of a river, seem to be the only homes in town, and most of what goes on in each house seems to be staged for the benefit of the other.) Dalton sees he needs help to clean up the bar. So he calls in his best friend, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), who is the second-best barroom bouncer in the world. (Note to cable TV operators: The world finals of bouncing might pull in decent ratings.) This upsets Wesley no end, since his income depends on maintaining an iron rule of terror over the local townspeople.

"Road House" is said to be based on an actual case in Missouri where the local bad guy, universally hated by everyone in town, was murdered in broad daylight - and no one in town seems to have seen a thing. If that is the genesis for the story, everything else in it seems to have come from a cheerful willingness to go over the top in every way possible.

This is the first movie in a long time to use the line, "Prepare to die!" And how long has it been since the same movie contained a) a dash into an exploding building to save an occupant; b) a rock 'n' roll band protected by a Plexiglas shield; c) goons who line up for instructions and call the bad guy "boss"; d) a lecture on the fine points of bouncing; e) a sexy woman doctor who goes all the way on the first date, and f) random quotations from the great Western philosophers? This movie is so top-heavy with plot, it can even afford to ignore some obvious possibilities. For example, Swayze's rented room is on a ranching spread across the river from Gazzara, and Gazzara is so busy with his other villainous duties that he doesn't have time for the standard subplot in which he wants to run the rancher off the land so he can build a subdivision. Of course, in a town with two residences, there may not be much pent-up housing demand.

"Road House" exists right on the edge between the "good-bad movie" and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer. This is not a good movie.

But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.