Plot summary
Wahoo Cray and his father, Mickey Cray, a professional animal wrangler, are hired to help with the latest episode of a reality series titled Expedition Survival! As Mickey was injured shortly before by an iguana falling on his head and is suffering the aftereffects of a serious concussion, Wahoo takes it upon himself to accept for both of them while his mother is on a business trip in China.
In addition to helping with the animals, Wahoo has to restrain his father, who becomes dangerously short-tempered while dealing with the show's flabby, obese, pampered, and obnoxious star, Derek Badger, who has little experience dealing with actual nature and no interest in learning.
While buying supplies at a Walmart in Florida City, the Crays are joined by Tuna Gordon, a teenage classmate of Wahoo's, fleeing her abusive, alcoholic father, Jared Gordon. Unsure what else to do, Wahoo invites her to join them on their camping trip into the Everglades.
Predictably, the shoot in the Everglades is a series of fiascoes. Derek's clumsiness leads him to suffer a number of injuries, including being bitten a dozen times by an agitated banded water snake that he was attempting to kill and eat. Tuna, originally a huge fan of Expedition: Survival!, is dispirited to learn just how fake the show and Derek are; for instance, his trademark parachute entrance into the wilderness is performed by a stuntman, and between shooting sessions, he is airlifted by helicopter to a luxury hotel in Miami.
The final fiasco occurs one night when a lightning storm has grounded the helicopter and forced Derek to camp with the rest of the crew. When a large mastiff bat lands unexpectedly in their camp, Derek improvises a scene in which he plans to eat it, but the bat chomps his tongue in self-defense, and Mickey has to remove the creature without further mutilating Derek.
The next morning, Derek disappears, hijacking one of the airboats ferrying the crew and their equipment and driving wildly into the swamp. Derek has lapsed into a semi-delirious state as a result of infection from the bat bite; combined with a secret love for horror movies (specifically the Night Wing trilogy), he now believes he is in danger of turning into a vampire.
The show's crew organizes a search party from the souvenir shop on the Tamiami Trail they are using as a headquarters and things get further complicated when Jared Gordon tracks down his daughter at the souvenir shop. In terror, she jumps onto one of the search airboats and pleads with its driver, Link, to help her hide. Wahoo joins her, but Jared Gordon takes Mickey captive and shoots at the airboat as it is pulling away, seriously wounding Link. Jared then hijacks another airboat to track them down, taking Mickey along as a hostage.
Meanwhile, Derek, who has minimal real wilderness experience, is becoming increasingly wretched in the Everglades—hungry, thirsty, completely lost, and suffering numerous injuries from mosquitoes, a near-miss from a bolt of lightning, a charge by a feral pig, and numerous falls from trees he tries to climb.
While Mickey steers the hijacked airboat on an aimless course through the swamp, ensuring that Jared Gordon doesn't get near the kids, Wahoo and Tuna try to find some way of going after them and also getting the wounded Link back to civilization. When their airboat dies, they search the tree island they landed on and happen upon Derek, half-delirious. They try to bail out the half-sunken airboat Derek stole, but Derek quickly collapses from exhaustion.
Wahoo and Link are briefly separated from Tuna, when Jared Gordon finally tracks her down. Knowing the police are now after him, Gordon demands that Mickey drive him and Tuna out of the swamp and help them escape. Mickey refuses to let Tuna go with her abusive father, so Gordon shoots him in the foot. When Link appears, demanding the return of his airboat, Gordon takes aim with his gun, and Wahoo jumps him. Gordon throws Wahoo aside and raises his gun, but then Derek charges out of the trees and, still delirious, overpowers Gordon by biting him ferociously on the neck, like a vampire. Gordon is tied up when the search parties finally arrive, rushing Mickey and Link to the hospital and placing Gordon under arrest. Wahoo and Tuna both thank Derek for his heroism, and Tuna makes a point of asking for an autograph.
A few months later, the Everglades episode of Expedition: Survival! is broadcast to an enormous audience, thanks to the publicity about Derek's heroic actions in the swamp. However, Derek's contract with the show is not renewed after he foolishly tries to leverage this publicity to demand a higher salary. He is replaced by an outdoorsman from New Zealand.
Thanks to some veiled threats from Wahoo's older sister, a lawyer, the show's producers agree to pay Mickey and Wahoo the full amount promised for their services. While the Cray family is watching the Everglades episode on television, Wahoo receives a phone call from Tuna, who is now living with her mother, Gordon's estranged wife, in Chicago. Neither of them is looking forward to testifying at Gordon's criminal trial, but Tuna promises that, regardless, she and her mother will be visiting Florida again. They promise to meet up again soon, addressing each other by the nicknames they pinned on each other during the adventure, "Lance" and "Lucille."
