This rather endearing and slightly mad documentary about hunting for Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades is exactly what you’d expect from a movie about hunting pythons in the Florida Everglades but then a little bit more.

From the opening titles with lurid green and curly yellow text, you can see that director Xander Robin is tethering this story to a stylistic nether world somewhere in an 80s pulp magazine.

We begin with some facts that I knew nothing about. I kind of assumed that pythons were native to the southern American states as it seems like the kind of impressive animal that would inhabit the Florida wild. It turns out they are not and it is believed that, rather spectacularly like a Jurassic Park-type movie, a hurricane destroyed a python breeding facility and let loose 900 hatchlings into the wild. Now there are potentially up to 500,000 pythons on the loose.

Florida has had several goes at eradicating them, the first allowing people to legally catch and export or sell pythons. A change of policy saw them employe python hunters with the rule that any python caught needed to be killed. As part of this push, maybe because the strategy hadn’t been particularly successful, they launched the annual python hunt challenge where any person can come and, over a certain number of days, catch and kill pythons. There are prizes for the most pythons, the biggest python, the longest python etc.

We are introduced to range of characters, most of them adorably eccentric. There is Toby, a writer for a hunting magazine who has brought down Sheila. She is 82 and has on her bucket list to ‘pith’ a python, the term for inserting something sharp into their brain cavity and scrambling around, apparently the most humane way to kill a python.

We also meet Richard who is from California. It feels like he is here for the vibe, often heading out to hunt pythons after having a little bump of ecstasy. He hosts a ‘snakers’ party in his motel room, bringing together all the other hunters who are staying. He’s that kind of guy.

And then there is Jimbo. You feel like there is more to Jimbo’s story but he tells us that he was once one of the people employed to hunt pythons but lost his job when he accepted a python from someone else and then submitted it as a kill, apparently against the rules. This feels like a minor infraction but it got him banned from the job, and also participating in the python hunt challenge. He is understandably a little bit antagonistic towards the government and the hunt.

The documentary is an interesting mix of watching and laughing at oddballs and finding out and appreciating the particular challenges of dealing with an introduced species in a wilderness. And I say that we laugh at the oddballs but it is in a warm and appreciative way, as what emerges from each of them is a sensitivity and charm that is not necessarily apparent at first apparent. Except maybe for Sheila. The gleam in her eye when she talks about killing a python is a little bit scary.

The one who won me over was Toby. He looks like a redneck backwoods man, but we have several moments where he is writing his article for the magazine and it is absolute poetry. It is clear he has a deep and abiding love for the Everglades and somehow it makes it all seem so much more human. His devotion to finding a python for Sheila to kill is almost touching, if it wasn’t so macabre.