“It’s hours of boredom interrupted by a few minutes of pretty intense adrenalin,” says one jaded participant in the Florida Python Challenge, an annual government-organized effort to curb the state’s vast, destructive Burmese python population. Happily, in his aptly peculiar film, docmaker Xander Robin downplays the boredom in favor of the adrenalin, and even more compellingly, of the Challenge’s diverse but uniformly eccentric sociological makeup. Selecting an ensemble of real-life capital-C Characters as our guides through an event that, while pragmatic in conception, proves violently lurid in execution (so to speak), Robin offers a slice of true modern Americana with the same balance of earthy reality and semi-surreal bad taste that made “Tiger King” a viral hit a few years back.
Where that doc series had the advantage of global Netflix exposure to make it a sensation, “The Python Hunt” has the makings of a more organically fostered cult item. It premiered more than a year ago at SXSW — where it took a Special Jury Prize — and has since then steadily maintained its profile on the international festival circuit before finally hitting U.S. theaters this weekend through well-matched indie distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories. But it ought to eventually have a long life on VOD platforms, fueled by jaws-agape word of mouth.
Before Robin gets into the madness, at least, he lays out the method — explaining how the Florida Everglades became overrun with Burmese pythons, an invasive species that initially entered the U.S. as a popular choice of exotic pet. A widely held theory is that a large number of them were accidentally freed into the wild when 1992’s Hurricane Andrew laid waste to one large reptile breeding facility: Since then, they’ve bred like the rabbits they eagerly snack on; according to the film, the present-day python population in the state is estimated at anywhere between 50,000 and half a million. Beautiful beasts they may be, but they’re destructive too, devouring so much of the region’s indigenous wildlife that the state has formally declared war on them.
While professionals are commissioned year-round to carry out the cull, once a year the public is invited in on the act. For 10 days every summer, keen amateur hunters from around the country join the pros in weeding out as many serpents as they can in pursuit of a cash prize. It’s not an exercise for the faint of heart or, arguably, the sound of mind. The gaggle of would-be viper-wipers on which Robin’s camera settles are certainly a rum bunch, ranging from Anne Stratton, an 82-year-old widow with no hunting experience whatsoever but a strangely vigorous desire to shank a python through the skull, to the young but far more practiced Madison Oliveira, a fiercely organized ex-Marine who treats her male hunting cohorts with brisk contempt, and her serpentine quarry with poignantly tender care. (The pythons she captures are bagged and taken home to be painlessly euthanized; others aren’t so lucky.)
Alpha males in the bunch include James McCartney, formerly a professionally employed python hunter, who has turned into something of a renegade since falling out with administrators — taking part in one of several unofficially-run side contests, and bringing his formidably accomplished teenage daughter Shannon into the fold. Lest one think the Challenge attracts only a certain kind of roughneck, manbun-sporting San Francisco science teacher Richard Perenyi is out to prove otherwise, to the bemusement of others in the hunt; more expected is Toby Benoit, a burly Floridian man of the wild recruited by the ornery Stratton as her driver and guide.
Each of these subjects, along with several others, is distinctive and charismatic enough to be a central figure, though Robin hedges his bets on all of them, to consistently flavorful and entertaining effect — though the film’s storytelling focus comes and goes, and we’re left wanting to know more about some characters beyond their enthusiasm for this somewhat terrifying ritual. Mostly, however, “The Python Hunt” seeks to steep us in the queasily atmospheric thrill of the chase, and this it achieves with a fine, morbid sense of irony and indelible atmosphere: With the hunting largely taking place at night, cinematographers David Bolen and Matt Clegg play the oily Everglades darkness against the unforgiving manmade glare of headlamps and flashlights to fluorescent fever-nightmare effect.
And as caught up as the doc is in both the excitement and the absurdity of what one observer ruefully calls “the Burning Man of snake-hunting,” it maintains some skeptical distance too. Robin hears out the local residents and environmentalists who wonder whether the government’s emphasis on python-hunting is a distraction from greater threats posed to the local ecosystem by industrially endorsed pesticides. Meanwhile, it’s hard to shake some distaste for the professed bloodlust of certain players in this supposedly eco-minded contest: Are they there primarily to conserve, or to kill? When some participants describe the python as “a foreign invader on American soil,” one has to wonder what the Challenge really represents to them. There, this rivetingly hazy, crazed portrait permits a lot of latitude: There’s no single purpose to any event that gathers this many kinds of kinds in one untamed place.
