Wisconsin Death Trip (2000)

Tedious, Condescending......

I have never read the book this documentary was inspired by but the subject matter of a real life town plagued by disaster and insanity near the turn of the last century sure sounded interesting. Unfortunately the movie is quite tedious with long drawn out shots and scenes that are so slow I once had to check the DVD player to see if I had paused it by mistake. I don't know much about Wisconsin but I can read a map and see that contrary to the impression the filmmakers try to make the weird events reported in this story took place throughout the state often well over a hundred miles from the town of Black River Falls which is the film's focus. And are the Wisconsin murders, suicides, premature deaths, commitments to "insane asylums" etc really even all that unusual for the time period or any time period? I can remember hearing local stories of equally tragic and unusual proportions from both of my grandmothers who lived their lives in rural Ohio and Maryland. Yet the filmmakers don't try to draw any conclusions about the universality of the stories but focus instead on perpetuating a viewpoint that the Black Rivers Falls area is cursed (by the Winnebago Indians perhaps?).

The reenactments of the stories reminded me of "features" local television news shows often come up with during "sweeps months" to boost their ratings. These historic reenactments come complete with spooky sound effects, chilling music and an ominous narrator who speaks in a sinister whisper when reading the circumstances of an inmate at the state's insane asylum. All of the historic scenes are shot in black and white but there is some color film used that shows modern small town Wisconsin. The portion of the documentary that shows these rather ordinary pleasant people (some in nursing homes) seems to be intent in showing the present day folks are as "unusual" as their forebears and this portion of the film is both condescending and offensive. January 21, 2008

Description VERY Misleading

This is NOT a story about Black River Falls, as the description indicates. It is a film about stories from around Wisconsin as reported in a paper from Black River Falls, with some hokey footage of modern (1990's) day Black River Falls.

There are very few photographs from the period and the film footage is mostly an attempt at what I can only call "modern art". Cut out about 20 minutes of "filler" and this would be a somewhat better film.

Basically, it's a collection of "strange but true stories" that have no connection to each other, except they took place around the same period of time and took place somewhere in the state of Wisconsin. And the modern footage makes no positive contribution at all. In fact, if I was from Black River Falls, I would be upset about how the town is portrayed.

A complete waste of time and film. February 2, 2007

Completely inaccurate and insipid

I want people to know that this is a very inaccurate portrayal of one small town in Wisconsin. Very few of the things in this film actually happened in Black River Falls. Most of them happened throughout the state and happened over a very long time period of over 50 years. This kind of schlock gives communities unwarranted reputations. Besides being inaccurate it is also just plain badly filmed. The whispering during the asylum scenes (which was not located in or very near to Black River Falls) as especially annoying. July 1, 2005

Boring

Lovers of the macabre know all about the horrors birthed of Wisconsin. Exhibit A is Edward Gein, a simpleminded sort of fellow prone to ambling around the small berg of Plainfield wearing a smile and his plaid hunter's cap. No one thought on Ed much, seeing as how he was a harmless chap always ready to lend a hand when it came to babysitting or helping out around the farm. Sure, his mother Augusta was a bible thumper with a poor opinion of the local ladies, but Ed was a right square guy. Even when a couple of women in the area disappeared, no one thought Gein had anything to do with it. Then the cops checked his farmhouse and found scenes of carnage right out of an Asian horror film. Exhibit B is Jeffrey Dahmer, a simpleminded sort of fellow prone to ambling around Milwaukee between his shifts at a chocolate factory. Jeff's private activities were, how should we say, peculiar in the extreme. After the police unearthed the soul shattering horrors tucked away in the nooks and crannies of his apartment, most of the man's fellow residents as well as the rest of the country began wondering why Wisconsin didn't have a capital punishment law on the books.

Yes sir, Wisconsin and its two odd ducks make for interesting reading. Potentially interesting viewing, too, if the documentary "Wisconsin Death Trip" had done its job. Unfortunately, Gein and Dahmer receive little attention here. Instead, the filmmakers posit that something downright sinister has always been going on in the region, and they promptly set out to prove it by culling late nineteenth and early twentieth century stories from the Black River Falls newspaper. You won't find quaint articles about which woman won a blue ribbon for the tastiest pie at the county fair in this movie. Nor will you see chamber of commerce reports lamenting the increasing cost of bacon grease. Nope, the stories these guys dug up consist of the bizarre, the awful, and the heinous. It's the story of Pauline L'Allemand, a supposed opera singer who moved into the area and lived there until she went insane. There's also the tale of thirteen year old John Anderson, a fugitive from the law after he went on an enigmatic killing spree. The most memorable figure in "Wisconsin Death Trip" is Mary Sweeney, a woman addicted to narcotics who went on window breaking excursions in the area for years. Murders, self-immolations, hangings, abandoned children, and a diphtheria epidemic find a place here too.

The documentary, sad to say, is about as interesting as watching the paint dry on your grandfather's Model T. Nearly all of the stories come to us through black and white reenactments coupled with a "spooky" voiceover that seems to scream "This stuff is scary!" Problem is most of the news articles in the movie aren't that scary; they are, in fact, fairly common for periodicals of this time. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time digging through old newspapers in order to do research, I can attest to the fact that lots of strange things happened in America, and not just rural America, back in the day. A diphtheria epidemic in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, you say? This isn't surprising at all in a time before modern medical techniques and improved sanitation rendered many afflictions scarce to nonexistent. As I watched "Wisconsin Death Trip," I began to think this was a film made for the consumption of cosmopolitan audiences who could look at the events onscreen as confirmation of their worst fears regarding those evil, Sinclair Lewis type provincials. Even worse, the filmmakers try to tie all of the events to one specific region when it's obvious from the voiceover that said occurrences took place all over Wisconsin.

"Wisconsin Death Trip" even tries to tie the weirdness of yesteryear into strange goings on in the Black River Falls of today, but that largely fails as well. The police found a body out in the woods? Well, the police seem to find bodies out in the woods quite frequently all over the country. Law enforcement officials also discover them in houses, cars, rivers, hospital beds, streets, and every other place human beings frequent on a day to day basis. The events discussed in "Wisconsin Death Trip" seem strange only if you've been living in cryogenic stasis for your entire life--which, I hear, resembles in no small way the experience of residing in Manhattan. The filmmakers could have done a better job had they simply rehashed the Gein and Dahmer cases, which would easily provide enough weirdness for several documentaries with a lot of strangeness left over for more. The DVD version contains a commentary track, deleted scenes, and a making of featurette showing us all of the people who worked on the reenactments. Yawn. I recommend almost any horror film or true crime book over this documentary. You'll thank me in the morning.
January 5, 2005

Much wasted potential.

Wisconsin Death Trip (James Marsh, 1999)

Wisconsin Death Trip had the potential to be a life-changing documentary. James Marsh had all the right ingredients, he just put them together wrong. What he came out with is still interesting, but "what could have been" tends to overshadow "what actually is."

In the 1890s, the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, went insane. There's no other way to describe the goings-on. Historian Michael Lesy examined the town's history in the 1960s, releasing the book Wisconsin Death Trip, which was out-of-print for many years before singer Wayne Static stumbled over a copy in the nineties, titling the band Static-X's first album after the book. This documentary was released not long afterwards, leading one to wonder whether there was a cause-effect relationship there. The next year, the book was reprinted and re-released. It's a wonderful world.

The bulk of this sixty-seven-minute documentary, narrated by Ian Holm, is a straight retelling of a number of news stories from the Black River Falls newspaper during the decade in question, recreated by actors or illustrated with Charles van Schick's pictures (which also grace the original book), often both. There are a number of stories that are followed throughout the decade which draw the viewer in (it's impossible not to be amused by "the Wisconsin Window Smasher," Mary Sweeney, who travels the whole state snorting cocaine and throwing things through windows) and keep it from being just a string of unconnected anecdotes.

The real brilliance of the documentary, and what could have made it so great, was Marsh's intercutting scenes of present-day life in Black River Falls at the end of each section of the film. The demand for comparison is obvious, but the scenes of modern-day life are far too short for the viewer to make any comparisons, whether they be serious or light-hearted. There is no narration in the modern scenes, no attempt to look for descendants of those mentioned in the news stories (that we can tell, anyway), nothing but panoramic vistas of modern Black River Falls life. It's vague enough that an op-ed piece written in the 1890s, narrated over a modern scene in the only piece of narration given to film shot in color here, leaves the viewer confused as to whether the piece is supposed to be ironic (as it obviously was when it was written) or showing that the town really has reached the point the writer put forth a century before.

There is quite a bit to like here, but there could have been so much more. *** December 14, 2004

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