Lamar Reviews - "Tickled" (Airdate 8/16/2024)

I love a documentary about just about anything, but especially if it looks a little weird and then turns out to be nothing like you thought it was going to be, a gets even weirder. You go into this thinking this is about competitive tickling. Well, it’s possible. The 2024 Olympics had competitive break dancing, and now everybody knows who the Australian Raygun is! But it turns out this documentary is not really about competitive tickling, it is about something much, much more.

The film is produced by the New Zealand-based “pop cultural reporter” David Farrier, and it starts off tongue in cheek about the so-called sport of 2 or more men tickling each other. But he runs into a lot of resistance even to the point of legal threats.

David Farrier is bombarded with phone calls from Jane O’Brien, representing the Competitive Tickling industry, bashing him for being Gay and saying they don’t want to be associated with gay people.

And she says very awful, derogatory, homophobic stuff to him. This makes no sense because as we soon find out that instead of “competitive tickling” this has all turned out to be gay tickling fetish films of young men tickling each other. They went as far as to post on David’s company’s Facebook page this statement.  “Association with a homosexual journalist is not something we will embrace.” When David told O’Brien he was going to make a film he was threatened with legal action. Had it not been for a Kickstarter campaign the project would have stopped.

Now all of sudden it seems there is way more to this than competitive tickling, or even tickling fetish stuff. As my buddy Will says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” Somebody is going to a lot of trouble and spending a lot of money to stop something so minor as this.

The Documentary is 1 hour and 32 minutes, Rated-R for language and shirtless men being tickled.

I really can’t get into any more details without ruining the film. I’ve given what might seem like a lot of information, but trust me, there is way more to it than I have revealed.

These guys were dogged in their pursuit of the truth despite the legal threats. They sat in a car, not just for hours, but for days, tracking the guy that is in the middle of the entire thing.

If you don’t get anything else out of this, it shows you that the only way to escape wealthy, litigious bullies is to pursue them until what they are doing is seen in the light of day, and in this case, on film. That’s how you punch this kind of bully in the mouth!

What you won’t see is when they first showed this at all the film festivals trying to get it picked up, they had several more encounters with the person at the center of this thing trying to stop them.

Very interesting, and well done.

My Score: 6 Buds