A pelting: "Hundreds of Beavers"

Here's one of those curveballs so far removed from Recent Developments in Contemporary Cinema that critics have had to cast around in a bid to lay down some pointers and recover their bearings. So, yes, Hundreds of Beavers is as beholden to Buster Keaton as it is to Guy Maddin; it's bound to remind some onlookers of a live-action Looney Tune or the prologues of those Ice Age movies; those with more outré viewing tastes will be set to thinking about Trigger Happy TV's posh tiger and malevolent squirrel sketches, or Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Cannibal!: The Musical. Yet it seems equally inspired by the proliferation of Internet memes, and increasingly resembles a game you might observe somebody else playing on a phone while waiting for the arrival of a night bus. What is it, exactly? On a basic, nuts-and-bolts level: a near-silent yarn - shot for a pittance in grainy monochrome around the wilds of Wisconsin - about a beardy Davy Crockett type (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) undergoing a trial by ice in an American wilderness beset by beavers, hundreds of beavers. A key twist: said critters are represented not by state-of-the-art computer effects, but fully grown men and women dressed up in mascot suits. More so than Twisters, maybe, here is a summer movie that delivers on everything its title promises - albeit on a fraction of the usual summer movie budget, divided up between regional costume hire shops and some especially willing extras, selflessly cramming themselves into the sweaty, furry movie equivalent of the old-school pantomime horse get-up.

So it's a goofy, readymade cult movie, sure, but Mike Cheslik's film also represents a valuable rediscovery of the art of the running joke. HoB wrings regular laughs from all of the following: the dazzling diversity of snowpersons our hero constructs to lure the beavers to their doom; holes that open up in the snow, seemingly at random, always with a pleasing, cork-out-the-bottle sound effect; a whistle that attracts the unwanted attentions of a low-flying, sharp-beaked bird, in a weird way becoming the film's own jingle; and fly-bys from a squadron of blackly pooping geese. It's platespinning on ice: Cheslik and Tews set all these gags up, keep coming back to them, and - in the film's most inspired stretches - get everything to interact with everything else around it. The iceholes are wormholes: you fall down here, and pop up there. The trapper allows the geese to poop on him to use as ink in the making of a map. A strain of schtick involving gobs of chewing tobacco, rerouting Laurel and Hardy via Reeves and Mortimer, builds to a sublime payoff. With its relentless, somewhat exhausting joke construction, the movie operates at an ultra-high frequency: it's something like an emission from the cinema of another planet, possibly one where the looming non-jokes of Deadpool & Wolverine aren't such a big thing. I could understand if you find yourself tuning in and out of it, or if you emerge equally amused and bemused: I did, too. But the funny stuff is very funny: the revelation of the beavers' innards (polystyrene packing peanuts and hand-knitted offal), the steaming husky poop that looks exactly as it should, one hall-of-fame gag, recommended for all ages, involving a telescope that isn't. Amid the frantic huffing-and-puffing in pursuit of laughs, there are even odd flickers of the frontier poetry one finds in those Keaton films completed fully a century before Hundreds of Beavers. This snow is as a blank sheet of paper that invites doodles, a site of unspoilt imaginative potential. (By pure coincidence, Cheslik sporadically interpolates Vision On's gallery tune, library music that has far greater resonance in the UK than it ever would in Wisconsin.) For a hundred minutes, anything seems possible again: if the American cinema insists on going backwards, there would be many worse ideas than returning to 1924 and rebuilding the industry from scratch.

Hundreds of Beavers is now showing in selected cinemas.