If you don’t know the name David Farrier, you probably haven’t seen “Tickled.” It’s not the kind of movie that one forgets. Farrier was a New Zealand journalist who stumbled into the strangest story of his career when he went down a rabbit hole of tickle fetish videos, discovering a strange network of threatening personalities underneath them. It’s hard to say for sure if “Tickled,” which Farrier co-directed, spurred the filmmaker’s interest in the obscure and the unusual or the other way around, but “Dark Tourist” definitely shares some DNA with that hit doc. Just as that movie often came from a “Can you believe this?!?!” aesthetic, “Dark Tourist” endeavors to show you things you’ve never seen before, and places you probably would never want to go.
The concept is simple—Farrier travels to places that have become destinations for people looking for things way off the beaten path. You may think of a vacation as sitting on the beach or exploring a major metropolis, but there are people out there who really want something different. Forget the beach, take a guided tour of the ghost cities around the nuclear disaster at Fukushima! Wander the Milwaukee streets in the footsteps of Jeffrey Dahmer, hearing the grisly details about his crimes along the way! Go to the “Glastonbury” of war recreation festivals, at which people dress up like actual Nazis … but prefer that you not use that N-word! For about 40 minutes an episode, Farrier focuses on a section of the world (Japan, Europe, etc.), visiting roughly three places an episode that you probably never even imagined you could spend your vacation days on.
“Dark Tourist” starts off on its rockiest footing. The first segment is the one about a tour bus going around the areas near Fukushima that have recently been deemed “safe to return.” The bus driver says he wouldn’t feel safe to live in a place with a 0.2 or higher radiation reading on a Geiger Counter. Most of the segment features Farrier and his fellow dark tourists watching their personal meters get much higher than that. While it’s understandable that fear over radiation poisoning likely blinded Farrier’s journalistic sensibilities, he never asks the burning question of why anyone would visit these places. And a bit about young people on the tour taking selfies and worrying about their Instagram posts seems out of place on a TV show that is doing some of the same things.
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