Wisconsin Death Trip

"Wisconsin Death Trip" Is a compilation of newspaper accounts from the Black River Falls area in the 1890s. The film delivers the facts along with glorious black and white photographs. Apparrently at the time, life had little value, and depression ran rampant. A nice assortment of calamities are covered including, irrational behavior (window smashing), suicides, dementia, a Diptheria epidemic, superstitions, murder, witchcraft, spirits, and lots of other depressing matters. Many perpetrators of these calamitous acts are dealt with by simply locking them away in the local insane asylum. The movie is loosely structured around crimes committed during the the four seasons. Though somewhat redundant, "Wisconsin death Trip" is also frequently fascinating. - MERK

The film is based on newspaper articles and photos, which is surely why it is so emotionally detached from its subjects, but it is simply not possible to have absolutely no emotional connection to any of the characters and remain interested in hearing about their deaths for two hours. It becomes tedious after the first 20 minutes and almost unbearable after 45. The main reoccuring characters -- a whispering mental hospital clerk and a woman who compulsively breaks windows -- are given no personality at all, only roles to perform, and only add to the problem. While well-shot, this movie is dull, plodding, and the worst kind of bad movie: it doesn't even attempt to entertain you, it just drags you along, waiting for the end.

Wisconsin Death Trip is a beautifully filmed, lyrical look at the underside of human existence in Black River Falls, Wisconsin during the late Victorian era, cross-cut with color images of Black River Falls one hundred years hence (1997). Told with still photographs, renactments, narrators, Wisconsin Death Trip will certainly shock moviegoers who long for the 'good old days' when we lived in close-knit small towns (or farms), life was simple, immigrants were hard working, family farmers were successful, and children always obeyed their parents.

WDT shows us, often graphically, that murder, madness, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, arson, bad children, guns, superstitions, poverty, ignorance, adultery, and fears about old age have always been with us and perhaps will always be with us.

The only negative comment I can make is about the veracity of the 'documentary'. Many of the events that were reported in the movie to have occurred in the pages of the Black River Falls newspaper occurred in other places - Beaver Dam and Poynette are much further south, Appleton is much further east, Eau Claire and Rhinelander further north, and the state mental hospital in Mendota is in Madison. The river and the sandstone bluffs are near the Wisconsin Dells; beautiful, in Wisconsin, but not near Black River Falls.

Anyway, I think that for such a beautifully photographed film such as this, it is minor quibble. Wisconsin Death Trip is the movie you would get if Fellini, an absurdist and grandmaster of black and white film, had worked with Bergman, with his dour humanism and northern European sensibilities.

Loved it. My family came from Wisconsin; wish they had used some of our family stories.

Although this is a documentary (taken from a book of the same title that was quite popular in the '70s), it doesn't feel like one. It doesn't feel like a movie either, so I don't know what you'd call it. But one thing I can say is that it is morbidly fascinating.

It is narrated by Ian Holmes, the only recognizable name associated with the film, reading news excerpts from a small, northern Wisconsin town's newspaper from the late 1800s. The occurrences are sometimes funny, often tragic, and unsettlingly bizarre. You have to remember that there was a very small population in the area at that time (the area is still not heavily populated), so the number of odd goings-on is curious. These occurrences have even more impact because they are juxtaposed with the very wholesome image that Wisconsin has always possessed (it seems whenever a movie wants to present wholesomeness, they set it in Wisconsin) as well as the beautiful vocabulary and syntax used in written documentation at that time. The documentary is also British, which ads another element to it--somehow I think they find it even more fascinating and that comes through in the presentation.

So, Ian Holmes reads the articles and we are shown photos from the period (sometimes they are the real people being discussed, but not always) and re-enactments of the crimes (they are mostly crimes), mishaps, or misfortunes. Infrequently, current-day footage is used, which I have read as a criticism, but which I think is misguided (see below).

The strongest thing I came away with from this documentary is that human nature is consistent, no matter what the era. The crimes and occurrences committed in and around this small Wisconsin town in the late 1800s are the same crimes that are being committed everywhere today. There are classic obsession crimes (i.e., a man asked a woman to marry him, she said no, he went to her house and shot her and then himself), classic sociopathic crimes, classic abuse cases, etc. I think the modern-day footage helps to bring this message home. But, there are also some

REALLY kooky things too, which are a blast. Look for the teacher who likes to travel by train. . . .

See this film if you think the world is going to pot; you'll realise its always been there.

Some seem to have missed the whole point of this engrossing documentary. I wouldn't normally regard myself as a documentary person but this film is stylistically excellent using period photographs and specially shot black and white footage mixed in with colour shots of the town of Black River Falls (which the movie examines at the turn of the century) as it is now. To put it bluntly, and I don't feel I'm spoiling anything by saying this, the population is suffering from insanity ranging from the homicidal to the simply inexplicable. Ian Holm provides a haunting narration culled entirely from the local newspaper of the day and this is interspersed with excerpts from the records of the local asylum to which many of the towns inhabitants are committed.

The story is one of collapse as harsh victorian values prove incapable of dealing with the economic and social conditions the town is experiencing. The towns inhabitants are simply incapable of dealing with their circumstances. Suicide and mania are the results.

An excellent film let down almost not at all by the slightly banal comparisons made between the town in its victorian 'glory' and its modern status as a crime capital which falls a little flat but is not without interest. Proof of the effect of environment on psychology.