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Through the fear and general miasma of the Covid pandemic, TV brought people together like never before. Among the most-watched series of 2020 was of course Tiger King, Netflix’s hit about an improbably twisty feud between a gay, polyamorous big-cat breeder and convicted felon, and the conservationist rival whom he accused of murder (more specifically, of feeding her missing husband to the tigers in her sanctuary – which she denies). It was the perfect hit for quarantine: bold and ridiculous enough to get everyone talking, and with precisely no bearing on the grief and awfulness that was all around.
Producer and co-director Eric Goode has made a smattering of Tiger King follow-ups since then, as well as another series, Chimp Crazy, about the self-described Dolly Parton of the primate world. His latest project – a co-production between his own outfit, Goode Films, HBO, and A24 – continues the theme, focusing this time on the reptile trade and taking its lead from the 2008 book The Lizard King by journalist Bryan Christy. It’s stuffed full of wild stories and even wilder characters: there are canny smugglers, underworld crime gangs, and even legitimate zoos that are said to have turned a blind eye to the provenance of their big, scaly friends. The series is centred on the US – although clearly the supply chain is global – and the two men who kickstarted the illegal trade: Hank Molt and copycat trader Tommy Crutchfield. Like Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin before them, there is no love lost between Crutchfield and Molt, and no odd biographical detail too trivial to skip over. Hank, says Tommy, “will turn anything good into bad”, while Hank reckons that Tommy is “one of the angriest and most bitter people I’ve ever met”. Along the way we learn that Hank used to be a mayonnaise salesman, and that Tommy worked at an extremely on-the-nose Florida establishment named Snake-a-Torium as a teenager, where he would later have his wedding reception.
What follows is the story not only of their enduring beef and betrayals, but of other adjacent vendettas in the illicit reptilian market. Despite environmental concerns becoming increasingly en vogue in the late 60s, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude still pervaded the world of wildlife trading, with many zoos happy to acquire what they needed from whoever happened to have it. There were, however, serious consequences for some of the creatures involved. With the police on his back, Molt once buried a stash of animals alive in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, a location which would later become infamous via The Sopranos. When he was eventually arrested, Crutchfield would become the go-to guy. He supplied cobras to the makers of a Hollywood blockbuster, he says, and sold tortoises to Michael Jackson. He even bred distinctive white albino alligators, which he sold for £175,000 a pop.
The gruesome, revenge-fuelled culmination of the men’s feud at the end of the first episode is the high point of Monsters of God, which then limps through four more instalments. The illegal animal trade gets entangled with the (less interesting) drug trade in the 80s, and – somewhere along the way – the story becomes less punchy and more of an attempt to shoehorn in every strange character and weird/shocking/grim (delete as appropriate) anecdote that the producers had access to. A tangent about a federal agent who wore a gorilla costume in a sting operation is rather funny but, er, isn’t this a series about snakes and stuff? It does feel like Monsters of God could have been a two-parter, but then maybe it’s simply too hard to kill your darlings when you have so many of them. The story of a German man who collaborated with Crutchfield (and who attempted to escape the feds by running across eight lanes of traffic, in handcuffs, and wearing Birkenstocks) is hardly essential. But it is clearly entertaining.
Monsters of God may lack that tight narrative thread that makes you want to recreate lockdown and spend five hours parked in front of the TV. But Goode is a conservationist as well as a film-maker, and it’s clear that he is interested in what became of the species whose existence was endangered by men like these. Much of the final episode is dedicated to notorious dealer Anson Wong from Malaysia, and the smuggling that meant that the ploughshare tortoise became all-but extinct in the wild. There is one final bit of good news, though, and a sense that nature – perhaps – is healing. It might not be a conclusion ripped from the bizarre world of Joe Exotic, but it’s the perfect ending to a wildlife documentary.
