When it comes to bad PR, it’s a race to the bottom for three species of land animals. Spiders have too many legs and eyes, scorpions’ backs bend the wrong way, and snakes, well. It’s just everything about them.
Since they didn’t have the common sense to grow a furry tail (basically the only distinguishing factor between cute squirrels and evil rats), no one really cares if you kill a snake. Hell, throw $10,000 into the deal and you’ll have a thousand amateur snake hunters spend 10 days in the Florida Everglades, risking bug bites and far worse to pull Burmese Pythons out of the muck.
As shown in South by Southwest-selected documentary The Python Hunt, Florida has a python problem. Whether they were dumped by private owners who didn’t realize they could grow to 19 feet, or escaped from an exotic animals fair during a hurricane, they’ve become a major predator in the Everglades. In response, every year the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission holds the Florida Python Challenge, a kind of free-for-all as a thousand contestants drive up and down country roads trying to find pythons and collect them by hand to be humanely euthanized.
Director Xander Robin breaks the rule of three when it comes to his cast of idiosyncratic snake hunters, each there with their own reasons for wanting to put a pick in a python’s brain. That’s the preferred and supposedly most painless way of killing these unwelcome swamp guests, but the hunt isn’t exactly that easy on either humans or snakes.
An endless stream of wannabe Dusty Crums pass in front of the lenses of cinematographers David Bolen and Matt Clegg, like they’d set up trap cams to observe them. Some are more oblivious to the perils of the area than others, some can’t tell a crocodile from a cotton mouth, some are serious ecologists, some are just there to say they were there, and some are just there to take ecstasy and stare at the moon.
Ultimately, Robin unevenly settles on a trio of hunting party leaders at the film’s core. Richard, a biologist from San Francisco more desperate to fit in with the rough and tumble Floridians than he is to catch anything: Toby Benoit, the seasoned outdoorsman so out of shape he can barely climb out of his truck; and Jimbo, a former professional python hunter who has become deeply disabused of the whole idea of this mass cull.
It’s the latter that increasingly becomes the moral center of The Python Hunt. What Robin communicates through him is that there’s something bigger at play than just getting to know this wildly varying cadre of contestants. The Florida Python Challenge is predicated on the idea that invasive species cause carnage, and that’s undeniable. From the incorrectly-named Norwegian rats that spread from China, to the rabbits that devastated the Australian Outback, and the rogue feral hogs on Hawaii, non-indigenous species can send ancient ecosystems spiraling out of control and eradicate many species of animals and plants. But as the haul from this determined hunt is barely enough to make a snake skin belt, Jimbo becomes increasingly convinced that this creature big enough to eat a sheep is really just the scape goat for a different invasive species.
If Jimbo is the moral compass for the film’s ecological subtext, it’s Toby Benoit who becomes its heart. One hundred percent good ol’ boy on the outside, he’s a sensitive mystery wrapped up in an artistic enigma, even as he tries to give his tour clients – especially retiree Anne – a taste of snake blood. Seriously, she’s one octogenarian you wouldn’t want around a folding knife as she warbles excitedly about killing nasty critturs to save the little animals.
That’s what may be saddest and most moving about The Python Hunt, that everyone is so well-intentioned. The end result is still the same, the wholesale butchery of a lot of snakes. There’s a final scene at an unofficial python hunt jamboree that is utterly stomach churning, in part because it is so graphic and in part because it comes after 90 minutes of occasionally spotting these oddly graceful and subtly beautiful creatures in the wild. Robin doesn’t make a definitive statement about the science of the hunt, but after the audience stares long enough into those strange nictitating eyes, they’ll know who the real mass murdering interloper is.
Screens again Thursday, March 13.
The Python Hunt
Documentary Spotlight, World Premiere
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.