Tickled (2016)

Tickled: Directed by David Farrier, Dylan Reeve. With David Farrier, Dylan Reeve, David Starr, Kevin Clarke. Journalist David Farrier stumbles upon a mysterious tickling competition online. As he delves deeper he comes up against fierce resistance, but that doesn’t stop him getting to the bottom of a story stranger than fiction.

“As with The Jinx, a simple take-away is this: you get someone who has a *lot* of personal identity issues and a *lot* of New York family money, and it makes for a ridiculously dangerous combination – emphasis on both ridiculous and dangerous.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThis was riveting material as a mystery-unfolds story, though the filmmaking is fairly standard as an expose (you canu0026#39;t help but feel suspense for the directors as they have to do literal stake-outs outside of places like the u0026#39;Tickleu0026#39; video building, where as if out of the Jokeru0026#39;s hide-out you can hear the barbaric sounds of laughter wafting out of the windows, or when they wait for days to find the one car that belongs to the now-late David Du0026#39;Amato). It gets stronger and more disturbing as it goes along as the directors discover more and more in places they werenu0026#39;t necessarily looking; at first they were simply looking into another tickling-fetish video company out of Orlando not related to the group that was trying to u0026quot;sueu0026quot; the filmmakers (in quotes as it turned out to be a bust). Then this leads from one person to another, and it turns out to be aliases and undercover identities, stolen social security numbers from dead people, and a figure who was once an assistant principal at a school.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI thought at first this was going to all be some sort of goof, even into the first minute or so of the interview with the first u0026quot;tickledu0026quot; subject who agreed to talk on camera (face and all, not in the shadows or only just a voice or so on). What this so-called u0026#39;companyu0026#39; did is mortifying, and all for what is on one hand a seemingly innocent and on the other hand is disquieting; think about the times that you have, as a child, been tickled by your parents or tickle siblings or friends, and all in a having-fun sort of way. The manner in which some of these tickling videos were presented, one expects the Gimp from Pulp Fiction might appear to either tickle or be tickled.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnd yet people going into this doc should know itu0026#39;s not an exploration of ticklers like, say, Hot Girls Wanted where itu0026#39;s about the subjects in the videos. It touches somewhat on the fetish, but this, aside from some curious homosexual aspects (and I mean that not in any gross way, simply that itu0026#39;s interesting that itu0026#39;s all men and that David Du0026#39;Amato is one of those highly ashamed gay men of wealth and prestige and projects that on to others), is more about the depths of WTF that go into this u0026quot;Tiffany Tickleu0026quot; or whatever her name was and how she is really this one man Du0026#39;Amato.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eItu0026#39;s about power and control, and how it corrupts and makes humans into monsters, which slightly, thematically, connects back to how tickling in these videos is about submission and domination and being emasculated under intense pressure (again theyu0026#39;re *all* young, well-built men in the videos, never women, never men older than, say, 24). In that way, Tickled canu0026#39;t help but hold out attention – not to mention a final, devastating phone conversation with Du0026#39;Amatou0026#39;s step-mother.”