The Python Hunt is just as much a love letter to this strange 10-day event as it is to the Floridians who give the state its characters and the visitors who keep coming back year after year hoping to catch a big snake.

The movie is a lot of fun and masters a pleasingly detached yet sardonic tone early on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a lot more to offer after that, aside from a growing human menagerie of admittedly lively characters...

Suddenly the hunt takes on a strange extra meaning. It’s the sort of moment that would feel ham-fisted in a fiction film script, but in a nonfiction film, it’s gold. Sometimes, reality beats anything you could imagine.

But it’s the sage Toby who lays out The Python Hunt’s pro-humane message even before the snake-chasing starts. "If you ever watch Scooby-Doo," he tells them, "it always turns out the real monsters are always people."