It doesn’t matter how much they avoid people, how little danger they really pose, but just because they didn’t have the common sense to grow some fur and look traditionally cute, no one really cares if you kill a snake.
It doesn’t matter how much they avoid people, how little danger they really pose, but just because they didn’t have the common sense to grow some fur and look traditionally cute, no one really cares if you kill a snake.
As python hunter Joe Wasilewski, aka the Croc Doc, puts it in new documentaryHell, 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 and deliver their heads for a bounty. After all, 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 species fair during a hurricane, they have become a major invasive species in the Everglades. Claiming they were predators wiping out indigenous species, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission launched the Florida Python Challenge, a free-for-all hunt in which 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 has an easier time catching oddballs for his cast of idiosyncratic snake stalkers during the 2023 roundup than they do finding pythons. The hunt isn’t exactly that easy on either humans or snakes: The difference is that no one is putting a pick through a hunter’s brain. An endless stream of wannabe snake killers pass in front of the lenses of cinematographers David Bolen and Matt Clegg.
It’s as if the duo set up trap cams to observe strange species. Ultimately, Robin unevenly settles on a trio of hunting party leaders at the film’s core. Richard Perenyi, a science teacher from San Francisco desperate to fit in with the rough and tumble Floridians; Toby Benoit, a self-described eighth-generation Florida cracker and nature writer; and Jimbo McCartney, a former professional python hunter now deeply disabused of the whole idea of this mass cull.
The soul of the film, it’s through the latter that Robin communicates that there’s something bigger at play than just getting to know this wildly varying cadre of contestants. As the haul from the 2023 cull is barely enough to make a snakeskin belt, McCartney becomes increasingly convinced that this one creature is an easy scapegoat for human-created ecological collapse. If McCartney is the film’s moral compass, Benoit becomes its heart.
One hundred percent good ol’ boy on the outside, he’s a sensitive mystery inside in an artistic enigma, even as he tries to give his tour clients – especially retiree Anne Straton Hilts – 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 reptiles to save the little fuzzy and feathered critters. , 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 gets snake-struck, staring into those strange nictitating eyes, they’ll have no doubts about which species is the real mass-murdering interloper. has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press.
If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.
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