Just two of the title characters in Hundreds of Beavers (SRH Productions)

When people say “They don’t make movies like they used to anymore,” Hundreds of Beavers probably isn’t the first example that comes to mind. Yet its gut-busting comedic brilliance makes that fact almost impossible to ignore. After all, the age of silent, black-and-white slapstick comedy closed out about a century ago.

Directed and co-written by Mike Cheslik (Lake Michigan Monster), Hundreds of Beavers is a throwback to the earliest years of Hollywood cinema, when physical comedy stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton reigned supreme. Update those performances for the modern era, throw in a boatload of insane, heightened visual/pratfall gags, an endless wave of actors in animal costumes, and you have the closest thing in recent memory to live-action “Looney Tunes.” It’s also unbelievably funny and, if you really want to punish David Zaslav for shelving Coyote vs. Acme, you’ll seek out Hundreds of Beavers wherever it’s playing.

Like most “Looney Tunes” shorts, the story is mainly an excuse to set up jokes. In fact, it takes over half an hour before the near dialogue-free comedy announces its title, spending the majority of that runtime building upon the misfortune of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a 19th-century traveling, bumbling applejack salesman. An opening animated sequence treats us to some of Jean’s alcoholic exploits before he has one drink too many and, through a series of interconnected, destructive events, is knocked out until wintertime, waking up in an unspecified but now-frozen wilderness. He’s hungry, and he wants food, so he tries to kill one of the forest’s many rabbits, raccoons, fish, and of course, beavers (either played by dudes in costumes with exaggerated heads or stop-motion), only to fail spectacularly countless times. Each time is more creatively absurd than the last.

Eventually, a host of new characters are introduced, including a grumpy merchant (Doug Mancheski), his beautiful daughter/animal butcher (Olivia Graves), and some experienced fur trappers (Wes Tank and Luis Rico), one of whom heavily resembles Santa Claus. When Jean ventures out into the wilderness, he tries (and often fails), but gradually succeeds at capturing/killing more game before exchanging their pelts with the locals, first to gain stronger equipment, then to win the daughter’s hand. There’s a joy to seeing Jean improve his skills over time, like a gamer who gradually familiarizes himself with the video game’s mechanics and tricks. Sure, he’s a bumbling doofus who gets his ass handed to him through misfires or incompetence. Yet Tews’s Bruce Campbell–like physicality is a joy to watch, making his failures about as fun and hilarious as the victories themselves.

The rest of Hundreds of Beavers is essentially an onslaught of gag after insane comedic gag. Just about all of them hit the mark. It’s impossible to list the creative gimmicks Cheslik and his team have whipped up, from a woodpecker dead set on attacking Jean whenever he whistles to his repeated attempts at sneaking through a cave of vicious wolves. And then there are the beavers. Life-sized workers, schemers, and target practice victims who gradually phase from curious background players to the latest source of Jean’s hunting checklist to eventually the movie’s final boss level. Oh, and at one point, there’s a trial with beaver versions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as witnesses, something that, however bizarre, barely scratches the surface of the final act’s craziest moments.

By all accounts, this film shouldn’t work as well as it does. If it’s parodying old-school cinema, it does so in the same manner as The Princess Bride or Black Dynamite. Its sheer commitment to replicating the setups and payoffs of silent slapstick comedy feels so in tune with the classic source material that Hundreds of Beavers no longer feels like an homage. It just feels like a great comedy in its own right.

Recently, Dune: Part Two director Denis Villeneuve expressed his dislike of overwritten movie dialogue, believing “pure image and sound” was the essence of strong cinema. I doubt Villeneuve was thinking about Hundreds of Beavers when he said that. But the results certainly vindicate his logic. You’d be hard-pressed to find a movie quite as distinct, or laugh-out-loud entertaining, as this one.