2025-02-19 02:00:00
After I saw Longlegs the other night, I was content with my take that it was an extremely dumb movie, brilliantly executed. That was that. But it seems to have occupied a mostly undeserved place in my brain, forcing me to keep thinking about it, not once, not twice, but as many times as it likes.
I’ve been trying to balance David Lynch’s philosophy of “the movie is the talking!” with the hope that I’ll find the one comment, review, or video essay that explains why I feel so conflicted about it. The best I’ve seen so far is from Erik Odeldahl on Bluesky:
For me it had the same vibe as the late 70s – 80s Argentos (Suspiria, Phenomena, Inferno). Super stylish and incredibly beautiful, with stories that kind of make sense but not really
With Longlegs, I kind of interpreted it as one big Satanic Panic joke too.
The Suspiria comparison is dead on: I have no problem thinking of that movie as a masterpiece, even though its story is pretty dumb. So how come I can accept that a European ballet academy would have a big, spare, liminal room full of razor wire, but the FBI not knowing the most basic personal information about its agents is too much for me to suspend my disbelief?
One of the differences is that Suspiria seems to me to have a sense of earnestness about it. I don’t think that Argento or any of the other filmmakers actually believed in ballet witches, but I do think they meant for the movie to be taken as it was presented, as a fantasy horror. With Longlegs, I could never shake the feeling that it was being insincere.
Earlier, I described it as “camp horror”1, but that’s not right. I think it’s more accurate to say that it feels to me like “horror movie drag.”
It starts with something that’s stylized and artificial, but is often treated as if it were dead serious (gender expression, or Hollywood horror movies about FBI agents investigating serial killers). It takes the most recognizable signifiers and exaggerates them as far as possible. Then it presents itself as if it were the real thing, but with everybody involved knowing that it’s a performance. Turning the dials to maximum on all of the signifiers turns it into something else entirely. And if it “passes” as the real thing, that’s fine, but that’s not the point of it.
As I mentioned, I’ve been avoiding hearing the filmmakers explicitly say what their intentions were, but I have heard a few snippets from interviews with screenwriter and director Osgood Perkins.2 One, paraphrased from my poor memory, says that the Silence of the Lambs format was something familiar and grounded that would pull audiences into the movie, until they realized that this was a different kind of movie entirely.
And I mean, I get that. Some of my favorite works of art have drawn heavily from that format established in Silence of the Lambs. And after years of repeating to myself that the narrative isn’t always the point of narrative art, and that I can appreciate art without having to write a book report to prove that “I got it,” I can finally appreciate something that is fully committed to style and doesn’t consider the narrative to be that important.
Even before I heard Perkins’s comment, I could tell that Longlegs wasn’t interested in being another FBI-investigating-a-serial-killer procedural; it wanted to give audiences a visceral feeling of dread and vulnerability, the certainty that something terrible was going to happen and there was nothing they could do to stop it. And a lot of people were able to say, “Nailed it! Good job,” and move on with their lives.
But it’s a sticking point that I haven’t been able to get over, because I think that the narrative draws too much attention to itself for me to ignore it as being unimportant.
The more I think about Maika Monroe’s performance, the more I love it. It’s obvious that the character was deliberately patterned on Jodie Foster’s transformation into Clarice Starling, but she has to be the interesting and sympathetic protagonist of almost every scene while also being numb and inscrutable. Really, all the performances are excellent. Especially an underrated one from Blair Underwood, who had to be one of the only normal people in a universe that was batshit weird. And I love Nicolas Cage’s casting — his performance is great but honestly, his being 1000% committed to a role is so much a part of his schtick now that this is actually one of his least unsettling performances. His character and make-up design are so perfectly eerie because (like Teddy Perkins from Atlanta) they’re over the top while not being completely unbelievable.
But then I remember how this fantasy version of the FBI doesn’t take note of the most basic information about its agents, like their birthday. Or their own children’s birthdays. Or the discovery you literally just made, that the murder victim who shares your daughter’s birthday had a lifelike doll that was brought to them by a stranger, and therefore it’s fine to let a random woman into your home with a doll that looks like your own daughter.
Or how an experienced FBI agent — even one who’s let her guard down because she can comfortably ignore the mountain of painfully obvious connections between your odd rookie agent and the series of deadly murders — could fail to hear someone walking up to her car in gravel.
There’s plenty more that’s too bizarre to be believable about this version of the FBI and the universe it inhabits. Like how Agent Harker is apparently on call at all hours, and she can get a call in the middle of the night and be expected to rush to a crime scene which is somehow in the daytime. Or how time and space work in general throughout the movie; scenes take place in day or night solely based on which will be creepier. And it’s difficult to tell how far apart any of the crime scenes are from each other, or how the agents visit a remote farm, a morgue (after an extended “autopsy” from an overworked coroner), and a sanitarium, all seemingly within the same day, but each at its own time of day.
But like the psychic abilities test, and Harker’s implausibly creepy house, I’m not that bothered by how much those strain credulity. I think they’re just meant to establish mood, and the details don’t really affect the plot. The bigger problem is in how much the FBI investigation story is intended to be used to drive the story.
In Silence of the Lambs, it’s basically the point of the entire movie. It’s still a Hollywood fantasy — even if it weren’t for the obvious stuff like keeping prisoners in an actual dungeon and a cell with a huge acrylic wall, or dragging Lecter out on a dolly with a mask and straitjacket, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who’s actually been to Quantico said that the entire movie was ridiculous. But it needs to read as realistic. It’s entirely humorless, it’s full of actors giving career-defining performances, and it’s full of details intended to prove the creators have done their research.3
In Twin Peaks, it’s really just a framing device. Like Longlegs, it uses the format of a murder mystery because it’s familiar to the audience, even though it doesn’t consider solving the murder to be the main point. But as stylized as it is, it still stays true to the general format of a murder mystery. Cooper makes Sherlock Holmes-caliber deductions that lead him to the next clue, and even though the investigation gets deliberately weird, it still holds together. In Fire Walk With Me, the FBI angle just becomes pure visual language, with memorable dream-like imagery like the contact’s acted-out code language, or David Bowie wandering through fluorescent-lit government hallways and offices. And finally in Twin Peaks The Return, I believe the FBI angle was meant to deliberately frustrate the audience. To comment on how audiences treated the question of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” as if it were the purpose of the series, instead of just its instigating event.
And The X-Files was somewhere in between, using its FBI agents4 and their cases as just the jumping-off point for each episode, with an occasional bit of Big Government Paranoia thrown in. The investigation hardly ever depended on Mulder and Scully actually having insight into a clue, but more often arguing over a clue until the subject of the episode put one or both of them into danger. In any case, crime-solving was never really the point of The X-Files, so it’s good that the series rarely made the investigation the focus.
So back to Longlegs: I’m not actually faulting it for not caring much about its serial killer mystery story. Honestly, I should’ve recognized much earlier that this was a fantasy version of the FBI that wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously, since it’s very early in the movie that we see Agent Harker subjected to a creepy and oppressive test to gauge her psychic ability. Instead, I’m faulting it for not caring about the investigation and then refusing to shut up about it.
So much of the movie is Harker in a dark windowless office, or a research library at night, or her insufficiently-lit cabin in the remote woods of Washington DC with huge windows but no curtains, poring over evidence, copying images from reference books, deciphering codes (using the Bible!) for secret messages. In a real movie, these scenes would be intended to show how the protagonist had made a uniquely insightful, or even lucky, connection that cracked the case wide open. In this movie, these scenes are intended to feel incredibly creepy and suspenseful, while you look for demonic shapes lurking in the darkness just outside the window or over Harker’s shoulder.
Ultimately, the problem as I see it is that horror and suspense movies are entirely dependent on the interplay between the filmmakers’ intentions and the audience’s expectations. More than any other genre, a horror or suspense movie demands that the audience is constantly making assumptions about what they’re being shown, and then recalibrating every time the filmmakers confirm or subvert those assumptions. Without that back-and-forth, it’s either completely passive, and without setting up and manipulating expectations, it’s just a series of cheap jump scares. Even the most charitable horror movie fan will say that that’s unsatisfying.
So it’s not enough for Longlegs to say “no for real, though, the FBI stuff doesn’t really matter,” when the audience expects all of this stuff to matter. If it is true that the FBI investigation format was chosen because it’s something that audiences are familiar with, then that’s all the more reason to be hyper-aware of all the connotations audiences are bringing with them. It seems almost unfair to bring up Hitchcock, but in Psycho5 the whole subplot with the stolen money and Marion Crane being on the lam was deliberately emphasized because Hitchcock knew that audiences would be invested in that story. So when it’s abruptly cut short for no reason, it feels like even more of a shock and a senseless waste.
When Longlegs shows hours and hours of painstaking detective work and code-cracking, only to have the characters completely oblivious about the most obvious connections, it just feels like the movie is either having a laugh at somebody’s expense (ours? the characters? both?), or it’s a sloppy missed opportunity.
Maybe if the Zodiac message written on a birthday card had led to a discovery more obscure than that the victims all shared a birthday. (With the investigating agent. And the director’s daughter. UGH.) Maybe if anybody at the FBI thought it was odd that all of these murders were within a short drive of the investigating agent’s childhood home. Or if the mom’s involvement had been less direct than full-on accomplice — her “dark secret” could’ve simply been to let the doll in the house and drive her and her daughter crazy over the decades, and it’s only when Longlegs is killed that she becomes “activated” and tries to complete the pattern. Hell, even if the codes had been revealed to be mocking the agents for missing the obvious connections, I would’ve felt less frustrated.
Obviously, I’ve only spent so much time thinking about the movie, instead of just dismissing it, because there’s so much that it gets exactly right. And the creepiest moments have definitely stuck with me. I guess it’s given me a new appreciation for everything that goes into works of “style over substance,” and how much of the obligations of genre or storytelling device — how much you have to be aware of and satisfy the audience’s expectations — really are unavoidable.
2025-02-17 03:00:00
Civilization 7 has been getting some pretty dreadful buzz around the internet, and I was happy to hear it. I’ve got a life to lead, and I can’t be devoting it to a huge time-suck on the scale of the Civilization games, so I’d have been glad to skip it. Civ 6 never really clicked for me, so maybe the series and I could finally have an amicable break-up.
Besides, even if all the bugs and UI issues that I’d been hearing about were fixed, there are still basic design decisions that sounded horrible to me. In particular, the two most fundamental design changes: separating the game into three distinct ages, and separating the leaders from the civilizations. If there’s one thing that makes this series, it’s the novelty of having, e.g. George Washington lead the United States from ancient pre-history into the space age. A Civilization game without that feels like a Sims game without plumbobs or kitchen fires.
But the problem is that it’s really pretty. I actually loved the cartoonish character designs of Civ 61, so I didn’t need them to go more photo-realistic with the art direction, but I think they struck a really good balance with the new look. It’s stylized enough for the characters to have personality, but in environments that are overall realistic enough that they feel more like a world map than a play set.
I figured that to get around my FOMO, I’d just go back and play Civilization 5 again, since it’s probably my favorite in the series.2 That — unsurprisingly — backfired, since it ate up most of a day and just put me in the mindset of wanting to play the latest and greatest.
So then I decided I’d try Civ 6 again, because I couldn’t remember what exactly I didn’t like it about it. And after several hours of playing that game, I realized… I still don’t know exactly what I don’t like about it. There’s just a weird sense of mushiness about the whole thing. I don’t have a clear sense of what I’m trying to do at any given moment, I don’t feel a direct connection between what I’m doing and what the end result is, and I don’t feel like I’m coming up with a strategy and then acting on it. Essentially, it feels like a long series of uninteresting choices.
And since it’s a three-day weekend, I decided to say screw it, YOLO, and I bought Civilization 7 knowing full well that in around eight months or so, there’ll be a special edition that’ll be a much better game for at least $20 cheaper.
Grumbling at the design changes, I started a new game last night and begrudgingly played through until my husband came into the room and told me that it was 1 AM and he was going to bed. And then immediately after breakfast this morning, I realized that I was eager to get back into the game, and I forced myself to stop at 5pm.
After that I’ve realized a couple of things: 1) I may not actually be a good videogame dude since losing so much time to them makes me just feel gross; and 2) the reviews making it sound like Civilization 7 is an unplayable failure are just ridiculous. The game absolutely has what makes a Civilization game: that compulsion to play one more turn, building, exploring, reacting, re-thinking your strategy.
It’s definitely not perfect. There are still a ton of units and systems that are inadequately explained. Units will appear and give no indication what they do or even what kind of unit they are. (What is a “migrant?” Is this unit infantry or ranged? Is this a combat ship or a trade ship?) Cities have production numbers, but I have yet to find where the numbers are coming from. (Why do I have -5 happiness? How do I improve happiness?) It’s hard to tell what buildings already exist in a city. It’s even hard to tell where the city center is, at times.
Also, the culture system and religion system are completely unintuitive. There are missionaries as in previous games, but it’s tough to tell what exactly they need to do in order to convert a city. The victory conditions mention finding “relics,” but I have yet to find out a reliable way to find them and what they have to do with religion or culture. It feels like something that’ll get improved in future DLC, but if that’s the case, I wish they’d left it out entirely and instead released a base game that could have new victory conditions added later.
After playing for several hours, I have a better idea of why they made the fundamental changes to the design. I haven’t yet finished a game — I’m still just a little bit into the second age — but I have seen an age transition. It seems clear that it’s part of Civ 7‘s attempt to make the series’s gameplay conform to a clearer narrative. Objectives are significantly (but not completely) different in each age. In my case, it’s been building wonders during antiquity, building ships and colonies during the exploration age, and I predict I’ll be focusing on science, technology, and culture in the modern age.
It acknowledges that Civilization games have always had a weird curve, where the mechanics that are fun and interesting when you’re building your founding city gradually become tedious micromanagement when you’re managing a continent-spanning empire. But it’s a shame that it enforces this division on every game, instead of having a new age based on your accomplishments in the previous age. It maps every game of Civilization 7 onto our version of history, when the series has always felt like a toolkit for creating your own alternate Earth history.
And I like the other change even less. I suppose that it’s a move to add variety, in case you’ve always wondered what would happen if Harriet Tubman led the Aztecs, but it makes everything feel disconnected and arbitrary.3 Not to mention unnecessarily confusing; in my game, I was perpetually confused by which leader controlled which city, since Napoleon was leading the Mayans and Benjamin Franklin was in charge of the Roman empire.
You end up not having a connection to much of anything, either. I could remember I was controlling the Persian empire, but couldn’t remember which leader I’d even chosen. Normally it wouldn’t be bad that I was controlling a character I’d never heard of; it’s an invitation for me to actually learn something, which is one of the best aspects of playing Civilization games. But I can’t remember any of what made my leader’s character interesting, and I don’t even know how I’d find that information at this point, so there’s little sense of personality to any of it.
I’d have to play a lot more to decide how much it works, but so far I think I would’ve preferred them to be more conservative in the changes: keep the idea of distinct ages, but let us take any civilization and its associated leader from antiquity to the modern age.
One change that I think totally works: they got rid of worker units, in favor of choosing tiles to develop at certain junction points. They’ve been circling around a solution for “too many workers” tedium for like three games now, and they’ve finally hit on one that I think perfectly splits the difference between interesting decisions and micromanagement.
The vitriol around Civilization 7 is so far removed from my experience with the game that… well, it fits in perfectly with my understanding of the video game audience. I think it’s extremely engaging now, if a bit mushy and confusing, and I can totally see my main complaints with the game as being fixable with patches and expansions.
I just wish I didn’t feel like my thematic problems with the game were due to Firaxis being too concerned about complaints of Spearmen going against Tanks in a battle. That kind of goofy alternate history is a key part of the series, and I think it should embrace it instead of trying to design around it.
2025-02-16 14:48:54
Before I say anything else about Longlegs, I should make it clear that it worked on me. I can tell because my watch was buzzing every 5-10 minutes, warning me that my heart rate had gotten too high. It is extremely creepy, right from the start.
But it’s also bonkers. Near nonsensical. By the last act, it had given in to its goofiness to such a degree that all of its creepiness had evaporated, leaving me to wonder what I really thought of it. (But I still turned the lights on when going upstairs).
There are two highlights: one is an extended sequence where the protagonist is inside her absurdly creepy home alone at night, and she gets her first solid clue to crack the case. There is a ton that doesn’t make sense about the scene. Does she commute every day from DC to a secluded log cabin in the woods? Why does she turn on the outside light and then go out to the dark portion of the house? Why does she immediately go outside? How did an intruder get past her and into her house?
But it still all works in the moment, because it’s filmed not just like a classic suspense movie scene, but like a super-heightened version of one. The house itself is both dark and exposed. The protagonist is small in the frame in a tiny island of light, surrounded by dim spaces around the room where an assailant could suddenly appear, an open doorway to the next room that a killer could jump out of, huge windows just waiting for a face to appear in a jump scare.
The other highlight is the opening scene, a bizarre encounter between a young girl and a stranger, in a small, ViewMaster-like frame that the movie used for flashbacks. Everything is framed weird. The stranger’s car doesn’t get close enough to the house, and the camera never gets close enough for us to see what’s inside it. The girl is completely expressionless, and her mood and even motivation is impenetrable. She looks at trees around the yard, each accompanied with a discordant jump-scare stinger. The stranger is cut off by the top of the frame, until just before you can see their face, which cuts immediately to the opening titles.
It’s all so eerie and unsettling, and it sets the mood perfectly. Why is any of it scary? We don’t know, really, but it must be, because the movie is telling us that it is!
And ultimately, that’s the best thing about Longlegs. I can’t really say that I liked it very much, but I absolutely respect the style of it. It commits so hard to being creepy that you have to appreciate how much it works, even while you’re completely aware that what you’re watching is absurd.
There are a few sequences in the middle that seem deliberately arranged for sustained weirdness, and specifically to let one of the actors show just how fully they’ve committed to the movie. Kiernan Shipka as a girl still under the thrall of some kind of evil. Nicolas Cage as Longlegs (not a spoiler!) freaking out in his car. And it starts with the head of a psychiatric home who is, for some reason, over-the-top flamboyant and careless about the condition of the patients.
After that barrage of performances, I decided that Longlegs is something that I haven’t exactly seen before: a kind of camp horror. Not a horror comedy, not something over-the-top in its gore (it’s actually surprisingly restrained on that front, in fact), not a lazy slasher, and not a parody that’s winking at the audience. Instead, it’s as if they took every aspect that makes Silence of the Lambs work and turned it all up to full volume, while refusing to take any of it that seriously.
Instead of calling it style over substance, maybe it’s more accurate to say that the style is the substance. In any case, I think it’s bullshit, but that doesn’t keep it from being gloriously creepy bullshit.
2025-02-15 13:15:30
Last night, we played through The Ladder by Hatch Escapes in Los Angeles. I’ve been vaguely aware of it since we moved to LA, but hadn’t tried any of the Hatch experiences yet. After last night, I can understand exactly why there’s been so much positive buzz around them.
Just to establish where I’m coming from: I’d rank myself as maybe “intermediate” with escape rooms. Definitely not an expert, but I have played through at least a dozen. And immersive entertainment has been kind of like a mechanical bull throughout my career; every so often I’ll be able to get ahold of a contract or an interesting project before it bucks me off and I’m back out of the loop. So I’m tangentially aware of the state of the art, but undeniably behind on seeing the latest and greatest.
By the way, I’m going to keep calling The Ladder an “escape room” even though it’s technically not. One of the things I like about it is that it isn’t as precious about its artistry or innovation like immersive entertainment can sometimes be, insisting that you use the correct terminology for the experience or you’re doing it a disservice. Here, you’re doing 90% of the same type of stuff you’d do in traditional escape rooms: you’re in a group of 4-10, together in the same space, solving thematic puzzles, but your goal is never actually to escape from a room. Instead, it’s tracing a career over the course of several decades, with a light-hearted story — which is genuinely funny and clever throughout — about corporate espionage and back-stabbing.
Until last night, Palace Games in San Francisco were the most technologically advanced escape rooms I’d gone through. The Ladder is extremely ambitious with its technology. I don’t recall any single effect being as dramatic as some of the entire-room transformations as in Palace Games’s best, but The Ladder spreads clever use of tech through every part of the experience. I was especially impressed that Matthew McClain, credited as the “Creative Technologist” for the experience, was selling copies of his book Arduino for Artists in the lobby, encouraging more people to learn how to make creative installations.
At several junction points in the game, the group has to make a choice from a menu, and each one had an ingenious interface that perfectly fit the theme of the room. Even if the rest of the experience had been a disappointment, I was so impressed with the initial room’s selection interface that I still would’ve considered the whole thing a success.
The most unique thing about The Ladder, at least compared to all of the similar experiences that I’ve tried before, is that it’s replayable. And not just in the sense that you can repeat it, but that you might be eager to go back as soon as possible and go through the experience again, so that you can improve your score. Probably the biggest problem I have with escape rooms is that they’re so prone to quarterbacking; one or two players can take over the experience, leaving the rest of the group with little to do.
The Ladder is designed around independent activities with a common theme. There is a main story-based puzzle that you’re working to figure out, but there are also multiple other puzzles or games in each room that you can complete just to improve your team’s score. Our team didn’t accomplish the main story goal, but I get the impression that we would’ve needed to complete the story and earn a sufficiently high score in order to get the best ending(s). And a recap sheet that you’re given at the end of the game reveals the fact that there are several different possible endings.
Our team had four people, which was the minimum number of players allowed in the experience, and frankly isn’t enough to do very well. I’d guess that the ideal number is around 6. The company sets the upper limit at 10 players, but I can’t imagine that many people crammed into the small rooms that make up most of the experience.
I’m being deliberately vague to spoil as little as possible, but if it’s not clear, I highly recommend The Ladder to anybody in southern California that has an interest not just in escape rooms, but theme parks or interactive entertainment in general. It’s really funny, and it’s designed to respect your time and let you have fun. I can’t wait to try Hatch’s other experiences, and especially to see what they do next.
2025-02-12 02:00:00
I don’t always understand why my brain makes certain connections, but two of my favorite “one-off” songs from the mid-80s were “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” by Icicle Works, and “We Belong” by Pat Benatar.
“One-off” meaning they’re not one-hit wonders (I am intimately familiar with “Love Is a Battlefield” and its video, thank you very much), but that I’m not that crazy about the rest of the artists’ songs but would still rank these among my favorites.
There are lot of other jangly guitar and/or percussion-heavy songs that might pair better with “Whisper to a Scream,” but my mind keeps going back to Pat Benatar’s anthem. Which is part of the connection; they both feel like anthems. They’re also both from 1984, and their videos were both filmed on white sound stages where the directors insisted the band play despite hostile if not outright dangerous working conditions.
How in THE HELL are we supposed to make music to inspire the youth of today when we’re BURIED under FLYING LEAVES or GAUZY WHITE FABRIC?
2025-02-10 03:00:00
I only intended to watch a couple minutes of Hundreds of Beavers last night, just long enough to verify that it was included with Amazon Prime video, but I was caught up in it pretty quickly, and I ended up watching the whole thing.
It was released in 2022, and I’ve been hearing people raving about it for the past two years. And it seems very much like something that would’ve blown my mind had I seen it without knowing anything about it. After the opening song, it’s filmed like a silent movie, in grainy monochrome, with a handful of actors and a ton of people in animal suits acting out all the parts of a hyper-violent, adult-oriented Looney Tunes cartoon.
It’s extremely clever, alternating between absurd slapstick, lowbrow humor, and ingenious gags with a rhythm that keeps you engaged far longer than you might expect. (Hence my “accidentally” watching the whole thing!) There were more laugh-out-loud moments than just about anything I’ve seen recently. One of my favorite gags was our protagonist Jean Kayak unsuccessfully using lady rabbit snowmen posed removing their bras, in an attempt to attract a couple of rabbits that turn out to be gay. Another had Kayak joining an experienced trapper with a team of sled dogs; when they camped every night, the humans would lie by the fire while the dogs would sit around a table and play poker. The dogs were picked off one by one, until the only survivor would stand at the table and play solitaire.
But possibly because I went into the movie knowing what to expect, I ended up liking it but not entirely loving it. I love that the filmmakers approached it as a real work of art, and they committed to making something that’s completely unlike anything else being made today. And I love that it felt as if they’d used everything available to get the look exactly right — cartoon drawings, video effects, puppets, overlays, some computer-generated imagery, whatever it takes. The end result is unique and completely true to itself, and also pretty damn corny.
One thing I like a lot is that as the movie progresses, it starts to embrace the absurdity of stuff that it’s spent the last hour asking you to accept as if it weren’t absurd. Throughout the movie, most of the animals are played by humans in animal suits, and as far as the movie’s concerned, they’re animals. Even though they’re walking around on two legs and doing human type stuff. When Jean Kayak manages to kill a raccoon and take it to the furrier, we see the autopsy, which includes pulling out lots of felt intestines and a heart-shaped pillow.
Later, when we meet a Native American trapper, we see that his horse is two men in an even cheaper horse suit, with the face of one of the men clearly visible underneath the misshapen head. A while after that, we see the Native American try to mount his horse, which clearly involves clumsily climbing onto a man’s back and trying to hold on.
By the end of the movie, Jean Kayak is fighting dozens of beavers, and he’s literally knocking the stuffing out of each one. A head will fly off, sending bits of padding and styrofoam peanuts flying everywhere. During one brawl, he picks up the body of one of the beavers and spins it around the room, and it’s clearly just his twirling around an empty suit. Then the beavers retaliate by throwing him into a wall, and it’s clearly an empty human suit.
There’s a rigid set of symbols in the movie, one that it establishes over time. When a character does this, that happens. When we see this shape, we know it means that. It builds up a language of gags over time, as (for instance) we learn what bait attracts which animal, which animals prey on which other ones, etc. So it’s neat that towards the end of the movie, it starts to deconstruct the language it’s been constructing this whole time. The symbols start to fold in on themselves. This guy in a beaver suit represents a beaver, and he is a beaver, except now he’s also a guy in a beaver suit. The Treachery of Furries, maybe?
I don’t think any of that was in the mindset of the filmmakers, or at least I hope it wasn’t. I just think that it’s an interesting side effect that happens when you so completely commit to the bit. From watching Hundreds of Beavers, I learned that the filmmakers have an earlier movie called Lake Michigan Monster that’s also on Prime Video. From the trailer, it seems to be almost as committed to being visually distinctive, and every bit as committed to being unapologetically silly.