Python Hunt

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida, hitting an exotic reptile dealer's facility, releasing 900 Burmese pythons into the Everglades. A few years later, the population had blossomed to 100,000 and decimated the local mammal population, so Florida enlisted a bunch of python hunters to take them out. They even started a "Python Challenge," inviting folks from all over the world to com kill snakes.

Or maybe the population was just devastated by Big EvilCorp pesticides and Real Estate Monsters and the python thing is just an excuse.

We get this second possibility toward the end of the second act of the documentary <em>Python Hunt</em>, Xander Robin's amusing, if not exactly edifying, documentary.

The Boy was of the opinion it worked because it didn't try to really pitch a message. I think that's a fair assessment on the one hand, but on the other to me it felt a little under-researched.

On the third hand, maybe that's because nobody knows except the pythons, and they ain't talking.

The primary focus of this documentary are the people who come out to do the killing. We got an old lady who wants to "pith" a python. (Pithing is a "humane" way to kill them that involves scrambling their brains.) She's being guided by a man who does this for a living (maybe?) and is driven to extremes by the seventh or eighth night when they haven't found any pythons.

We got a guy who writes for a magazine and who wants to catch one of these snakes to prove he isn't all talk. We got a guy from San Francisco, man-bun and all, who's gone every year for the past five or six years and never caught a snake. We got a couple of girls he meets up with, but we don't spend too much time with.

We have a guy, Joe, who's introduced as the SOB who knows what's going on. A snake-trapper extraordinaire with a long track record of getting big snakes—who's banned because he claimed a snake he didn't kill, which as he says, was the number one prohibition.

You'll have to reconcile for yourself what this suggests about Joe. The movie doesn't press the point. When his daughter was younger, she was some sort of online personality—the two would go out to explore the swamp together, I guess. She turned eighteen I guess, and decided she was mostly done with it. When we see her, she hasn't been hunting in a year.

Along with the "Challenge", a non-governmental "Python Fest" is going on, and Joe's a pretty big cheese there, apparently. But he's bitter: He sets up python decoys to mess with the yahoos that come down every year. The python hunt should be for locals, or something.

It's pretty good. Nice shots of the Everglades, which are something to see. Drags a little in the middle. Feels a little stagey/reality TV, which people who aren't me like, presumably.

On the Moviegique 3-Point Documentary Scale:

1. Subject matter. The topic of the Burmese python invasion may be important. This isn't really addressed. The real topic is the people, which can be fun, but isn't very important. Check for one of this blog's earliest reviews on that topic.
2. Presentation. Solid. A lot of nice shots of the swamp. A lot of letting people speak for themselves and not doing a lot of judging one way or the other.
3. Bias. It feels like there's a kind of "reality show bias" if that makes sense. Like San Fran Man at the end finds the decoys Joe makes at the beginning. I don't believe that was organic. But again, as entertainment, it's fine.

We were glad we saw it. The characters were interesting and somewhat endearing, and it's a nice little (weird) slice of life.