“It’s hours of boredom interrupted by a few minutes of pretty intense adrenalin,” says one jaded participant within the Florida Python Problem, an annual government-organized effort to curb the state’s huge, damaging Burmese python inhabitants. Fortunately, in his aptly peculiar movie, docmaker Xander Robin downplays the boredom in favor of the adrenalin, and much more compellingly, of the Problem’s numerous however uniformly eccentric sociological make-up. Deciding on an ensemble of real-life capital-C Characters as our guides by an occasion that, whereas pragmatic in conception, proves violently lurid in execution (so to talk), Robin presents a slice of true trendy Americana with the identical steadiness of earthy actuality and semi-surreal unhealthy style that made “Tiger King” a viral hit a number of years again.
The place that doc sequence had the benefit of world Netflix publicity to make it a sensation, “The Python Hunt” has the makings of a extra organically fostered cult merchandise. It premiered greater than a yr in the past at SXSW — the place it took a Particular Jury Prize — and has since then steadily maintained its profile on the worldwide pageant circuit earlier than lastly hitting U.S. theaters this weekend by well-matched indie distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories. However it must ultimately have an extended life on VOD platforms, fueled by jaws-agape phrase of mouth.
Earlier than Robin will get into the insanity, a minimum of, he lays out the tactic — explaining how the Florida Everglades turned overrun with Burmese pythons, an invasive species that originally entered the U.S. as a well-liked selection of unique pet. A broadly held concept is that a lot of them have been unintentionally freed into the wild when 1992’s Hurricane Andrew laid waste to at least one giant reptile breeding facility: Since then, they’ve bred just like the rabbits they eagerly snack on; in line with the movie, the present-day python inhabitants within the state is estimated at wherever between 50,000 and half one million. Lovely beasts they might be, however they’re damaging too, devouring a lot of the area’s indigenous wildlife that the state has formally declared conflict on them.
Whereas professionals are commissioned year-round to hold out the cull, every year the general public is invited in on the act. For 10 days each summer season, eager beginner hunters from across the nation be part of the professionals in removing as many serpents as they will in pursuit of a money prize. It’s not an train for the faint of coronary heart or, arguably, the sound of thoughts. The gaggle of would-be viper-wipers on which Robin’s digital camera settles are definitely a rum bunch, starting from Anne Stratton, an 82-year-old widow with no looking expertise in any way however a surprisingly vigorous want to shank a python by the cranium, to the younger however way more practiced Madison Oliveira, a fiercely organized ex-Marine who treats her male looking cohorts with brisk contempt, and her serpentine quarry with poignantly tender care. (The pythons she captures are bagged and brought dwelling to be painlessly euthanized; others aren’t so fortunate.)
Alpha males within the bunch embrace James McCartney, previously a professionally employed python hunter, who has changed into one thing of a renegade since falling out with directors — collaborating in certainly one of a number of unofficially-run aspect contests, and bringing his formidably completed teenage daughter Shannon into the fold. Lest one suppose the Problem attracts solely a sure type of roughneck, manbun-sporting San Francisco science instructor Richard Perenyi is out to show in any other case, to the bemusement of others within the hunt; extra anticipated is Toby Benoit, a burly Floridian man of the wild recruited by the ornery Stratton as her driver and information.
Every of those topics, together with a number of others, is distinctive and charismatic sufficient to be a central determine, although Robin hedges his bets on all of them, to persistently flavorful and entertaining impact — although the movie’s storytelling focus comes and goes, and we’re left eager to know extra about some characters past their enthusiasm for this considerably terrifying ritual. Largely, nevertheless, “The Python Hunt” seeks to steep us within the queasily atmospheric thrill of the chase, and this it achieves with a wonderful, morbid sense of irony and indelible environment: With the looking largely happening at evening, cinematographers David Bolen and Matt Clegg play the oily Everglades darkness in opposition to the unforgiving artifical glare of headlamps and flashlights to fluorescent fever-nightmare impact.
And as caught up because the doc is in each the thrill 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 native residents and environmentalists who ponder whether the federal government’s emphasis on python-hunting is a distraction from higher threats posed to the native ecosystem by industrially endorsed pesticides. In the meantime, it’s onerous to shake some distaste for the professed bloodlust of sure gamers on this supposedly eco-minded contest: Are they there primarily to preserve, or to kill? When some contributors describe the python as “a foreign invader on American soil,” one has to surprise what the Problem actually represents to them. There, this rivetingly hazy, crazed portrait permits lots of latitude: There’s no single goal to any occasion that gathers this many sorts of sorts in a single untamed place.
