“If you watch ‘Scooby Doo,’ it turns out the real monsters are always people,” Toby Benoit says in “The Python Hunt,” the kind of homespun wisdom that you come to expect from the poet and outdoorsman that is accompanied by knowledge that he’s unlikely to learn anything from it himself. Sitting in a car for hours on end, he has submitted himself to The Python Challenge, a state-run contest designed to rid the Florida Everglades of the snakes that have upended the delicate ecosystem in the region by any means necessary and the event has brought out all kinds of wild creatures of the human variety to take part. Being a local to the region, he’d likely be inclined to sit it out himself and wait for quieter times to hunt, but he’s been hired as a guide by Anne, a widow from Tucson, whose love of nature has led her to want to “scramble the brains of a python.”
There apparently was a time when director Xander Robin thought he’d be making a fictional feature about the area he grew up in for his second film as he did with his first “Are We Not Cats?”, but it surely couldn’t compare with the outrageously entertaining documentary he could put together from simply tracking various contestants around at night armed with bats and shotguns over 10 days. Produced by “Some Kind of Heaven” and “Ren Faire” director and fellow Florida native Lance Oppenheim, the film has a similar house style in its oversaturated colors and synth-heavy score that makes it feel as drenched in sweat as those it’s depicting in the humid region, but it projects an effortless cool otherwise, largely disengaged from the tournament aspect that most filmmakers would fixate on to get a greater lay of the land.
The irresistible cocktail of vigilantism, competition and nature conservation is one that seems as if it only could be conceived in the Sunshine State, but it does reflect the issues of an increasingly overcrowded world where everyone is fighting space, including those with scales. After Hurricane Andrew came through Miami in 1992, it’s thought that the devastation to the southeast port of entry for all international wildlife coming into the U.S. was responsible for letting loose the pythons that gradually killed off a number of indigenous species and reproduced at will, leading government officials to get creative with a response when patrolling the swamps themselves for the slinky creatures wasn’t a plausible solution. However, the Python Challenge isn’t a satisfactory remedy to all, with some locals resenting the visitors that are lured from places ranging from California to Vermont to kill pythons, some believing they should be left alone entirely and others who fall into a third group like James McCartney, who loves strangling the snakes yet finds the regulations around the contest to be too constricting and helps a local bar set up its own one-day competition.
The array of personalities that Robin gets on screen are incredible, from Anne ordering Toby around to find the biggest Burmese Python he can find as if they were a poor man’s Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen” to Richard, a science teacher from San Francisco who sees the excursion as a kind of vision quest, particularly after he drops a little ecstasy. Yet they also end up expressing the different attitudes towards solving large-scale problems that stymy progress from occurring more broadly when some use blunt instruments to kill off the snakes while others take a more methodical and less harmful approach, those with experience and familiarity are more likely to be patient than those from out of town who won’t live with the consequences, and the event is overseen by a government that throws money at a problem it isn’t willing to invest more thought into solving.
The antagonization of the python itself also comes into question. As Julian, one of the most skilled python hunters who doesn’t participate in the challenge notes, “Cats have driven up to 40 types of birds to extinction, yet you’d never see a person shoot a cat,” and while reptiles are considerably less cuddly and undoubtedly dangerous, they look to be no more of a threat to the environment than the people who seek to stomp them out. If anything, they add to the flavor of the place as much as their zesty human counterparts and become just one of the many imperfect creatures that “The Python Hunt” brings out a lot of love for.
“The Python Hunt” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next screen at the Florida Film Festival on April 14th at 9:15 pm at the Regal Winter Park Village and April 19th at 2 pm at the Enzian Theater.