HBO’s new documentary series Monsters of God abounds with colorful creatures – and those are just the humans.
The five-parter from Tiger King co-director Eric Goode features reptile dealers with a fondness for creepy crawlies and a loose connection to ethical and legal mores. There’s Tom Crutchfield, who loves women with the ardor of Pepé Le Pew but spends most of his time not in pursuit of the ladies but of exotic snakes, lizards, alligators, turtles and whatnot. His arch rival: Hank Molt (aptly named, given that snakes molt), a man who pioneered the shady trade of importing rare and often endangered reptiles to the United States (HBO calls it a “billion-dollar criminal enterprise.”).
Another key Monsters of God character: Anson Wong, a Malaysian “exporter” (to use a polite term) perhaps as cold-blooded as the creatures he rounds up and dispatches around the world. His nickname – “the Pablo Escobar of reptiles.”
The template for the series is supplied by the 2008 book The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers, written by Bryan Christy. The author, who appears in the series and serves as a consulting producer, took part in a panel discussion of Monsters of God Thursday night after HBO screened episode 1 at Vidiots in Los Angeles. He praised Goode and fellow producers for wrangling the reptilian importers, typically a wary group.
“I know what it took to run these people down, to get people to say ‘yes’ to you coming in their place,” Christy told the moderator, the actor Jason Segel. “And with a camera. I just had a pencil… It’s amazing what they brought together. And they’re celebrating the animals in a way that I hope gets people to care more about this sort of maligned species.”
Goode needed no persuading about the beauty of animals like New Caledonian geckos, African bush vipers, Caribbean rock iguanas, and similar Cyclura. He’s been an avid collector since childhood.
“I have a confession to make,” he said at the Q&A, alluding to his collecting urge. “I’ve been an addict for over 50 years and now I’m still not sober, sorry to say.”
The challenge of convincing reptile dealers to appear on camera became evident during the panel discussion, which included Crutchfield and Mike Van Nostrand, both Florida men who have served time behind bars for their activities (in 2022, Van Nostrand was convicted in a scheme to smuggle “illegally-harvested Florida turtles out of the United States and into China, Japan, and other places,” per the Department of Justice).
“I didn’t like the Tiger King,” Van Nostrand stated flatly. “Eric was a little tricky one.”
For his part, Crutchfield called Tiger King “one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen.”
Along with Tiger King, Goode also directed the 2024 HBO documentary series Chimp Crazy about people obsessed with raising chimpanzees as essentially human children. At the Q&A, he addressed contrasts between Tiger King, Chimp Crazy, and Monsters of God.
“Right now, a lot of people are thinking I’m trying to take down the reptile world,” Goode said of Monsters of God. “Yes, I didn’t like people keeping chimpanzees in Chimp Crazy. I wanted laws changed so you couldn’t do that. I didn’t want people having 200 tigers in their backyard [in Tiger King]. Reptiles are different. It’s nuanced. And as Mike [Van Nostrand] says, if people were breeding more reptiles that may take pressure off of the poachers. And so there’s a lot of gray in this story and it’s not painting anyone with one brush. Law enforcement made a lot of mistakes. We’ve made mistakes. The zoos made big mistakes and we’re all complicit.”
Zoos are complicit, the series makes clear, by paying dealers like Molt and Crutchfield to supply them with exotic reptiles knowing full well the wranglers were violating U.S. and international law. Federal officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service don’t seem to come off much better, to judge from episode 1. Nobody’s motives seem 100 percent pure in Monsters of God, self-assessments notwithstanding.
“What I really want people to get out of my complete performance from the very beginning to the end,” Crutchfield asserted at the Q&A, “is my great passion and my great love, and more importantly, my great respect for all of these monsters of God that you’re going to see.”
Van Nostrand chimed in sardonically, “Are you saying money had nothing to do with it?”
“So far,” Crutchfield replied.
Fresh episodes of Monsters of God will debut on HBO the next four Thursdays, and stream on HBO Max. Audiences may get hooked, mirroring the obsessional quality of true lizard people. Jason Segel, for one, pronounced himself a fan of the series.
“At times it feels like Goodfellas. It feels like Scarface sometimes,” Segel enthused at the Q&A. “I watched every episode over two days and was mesmerized. I can’t wait for all of you guys to see it.”
