May 10, 2026 4:50am PT

‘The Python Hunt’ Review: An Entertainingly Garish Documentary Account of a State-Sanctioned Culling Spree

Xander Robin's fluorescent, stranger-than-fiction film follows a variety of American oddballs chasing grisly snake-hunting glory in the annual Florida Python Challenge.

Guy Lodge

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Guy Lodge

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Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

“It’s hours of boredom interrupted by a few minutes of pretty intense adrenalin,” says one jaded participant in the Florida Python Challenge, an annual government-organized effort to curb the state’s vast, destructive Burmese python population. Happily, in his aptly peculiar film, docmaker Xander Robin downplays the boredom in favor of the adrenalin, and even more compellingly, of the Challenge’s diverse but uniformly eccentric sociological makeup. Selecting an ensemble of real-life capital-C Characters as our guides through an event that, while pragmatic in conception, proves violently lurid in execution (so to speak), Robin offers a slice of true modern Americana with the same balance of earthy reality and semi-surreal bad taste that made “Tiger King” a viral hit a few years back.

'The Python Hunt' Review: An Entertainingly Garish Documentary Account of a State-Sanctioned Culling Spree