Tickled (2016)

David Farrier, a New Zealand pop cultural reporter whose story subjects often verge into the bizarre, believes he's found his next story when he stumbles across an online video on the world of competitive endurance tickling, a sport where the participants, with hands and feet tied down, are tickled for as long as they can endure. Participants are flown to Los Angeles first class, paid $1,500, and put up for four nights in a luxury hotel. Suitable participants are deemed to be younger, muscular males. The event is held on a monthly basis. In contacting the organizers, US-based Jane O'Brien Media, via their popular Facebook page to arrange for an interview, David receives a return message from one of their representatives, Debbie J. Kuhn, declining the offer, the message a homophobic rant largely against David. In that message, Debbie asserts that the competition is wholly a heterosexual athletic activity, she who does not appreciate what will be David's assumed gay bent on the story as a homosexual himself (which David does not state he is or isn't in his request). David finds the message all the more odd as the activity as it appears in the videos has an undeniable gay vibe. What is even more odd is that Debbie on behalf of Jane O'Brien, continually emails David over the following weeks expounding on the themes in the original message. At this time, David's friend, Dylan Reeve, enters the fray, acting initially as a researcher for David, and then eventually as co-filmmaker for a documentary on the subject. However, the documentary eventually morphs from the sport of competitive endurance tickling into the mysterious world of Jane O'Brien and Debbie Kuhn, especially: as they seem to have unlimited resources both to hold the events and to conduct their online harassment they learn not only of David, but of former associates who now seem to want to distance themselves from the "sport" and Jane O'Brien Media; as Jane and Debbie initiate legal action and threaten even more legal action, and issue general threats time and time against David and Dylan not only for this unauthorized documentary but for their activities toward Jane O'Brien Media as a whole; and as no one seems to know who Debbie or Jane are, even the people that work for them, or what their end goal is, namely what will be done with the resulting videos of the competitions, which populate the Internet. The story takes a further twist when David and Dylan learn there truly is a tickling sexual fetish subculture, one within that community, Richard Ivey, who willingly talks to David and who remembers someone else online decades ago within the community with a similar M.O. to Debbie and Jane.—Huggo