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Wisconsin Death Trip | 
 enlarge | Director: James Marsh
Actors: Ian Holm, Jo Vukelich, Jeffrey Golden, Marilyn White, John Schneider (iii)
Studio: Home Vision Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $17.62
You Save: $12.33 (41%)
New (30) Used (10) from $15.97
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 53760
Format: Anamorphic, Black & White, Color, Dvd-video, Widescreen, Ntsc
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 76
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
MPN: DWIS010D
ISBN: 0780027620
UPC: 037429183625
EAN: 9780780027626
ASIN: B0000BWVL3
Theatrical Release Date: 2000
Release Date: February 24, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW AND FACTORY SEALED
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Inspired by the cult-favorite book by Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip is an eerily dreamlike film about the moral, spiritual, and physical collapse of a small American town in the 1890s. Stricken by economic depression, harsh winters, and a diphtheria epidemic that decimated the local infant population, the citizens of Black River Falls, Wisconsin--primarily German and Norwegian immigrants hoping for a better life in America--fell victim to a rising tide of insanity, murder, arson, and moral breakdown. By creating moody black-and-white reenactments of the horrid events chronicled in Lesy's book (which includes the haunting vintage photographs of the town's official photographer), director James Marsh conveys, through chilling detachment and the subtly sardonic narration by Ian Holm, the impression of sly bemusement, as if Black River Falls was preordained by fate to become a village of the damned. It's both fiendishly macabre and yet strangely compelling, weakened only by Marsh's suggestion (through color sequences of present-day Wisconsin) that things have never really changed since those creepy, ill-fated days when death was seemingly everywhere. Apart from that half-baked attempt at irony, Wisconsin Death Trip is a film you won't soon forget. --Jeff Shannon
Description
Inspired by the Michael Lesy book of the same name, Wisconsin Death Trip is an intimate, shocking, and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the 1890s. The town of Black River Falls is gripped by a peculiar malaise and the weekly news accounts are dominated by bizarre talk of madness, eccentricity, and violence amongst the local population. Suicide and murder are commonplace, and people are haunted by ghosts, possessed by devils, and terrorized by teenage outlaws and arsonists.
Featuring music by Debussy, Blind Mellon Jefferson, John Cale, and DJ Shadow. Narrated by Ian Holmes.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Photos of dead people, sad and disrespectful.... November 21, 2008
I thought that this "documentary" sounded great. It's not. Private photos of children's dead bodies, poorly reenacted suicides, and a dry narrator reading old healdlines, made this awful for me. Very broad definiations of insanity, alcholism, and no antibodics is the story here. Which could have been spun in a good but still interesting way, like look how far we've come, instead of taking a small town's troubles and trying to make an X-file like documentery. Bad....
 I think the townsfolk saw the documentary July 29, 2008
Based upon authentic yet dry turn of the century (1890-1900) news reports from Black River Falls, a small town in northern Wisconsin, "Wisconsin Death Trip" is a brutally slow, albeit odd trek through the various details of seeming insanity affecting the area. Interwoven with the century-old pictures shot by a professional photographer named Charles Van Schaik, fairly recent video footage is juxtaposed to display advancement and normalcy of today's Black River Falls. The old photos have a creepy tone considering several are at funerals of dead infants and toddlers, and the rest clearly display the harsh differences between contemporary life and that of folks 100 years ago.
It's probably safe to say that the majority of the unanticipated "insanity" was caused by the stressors of ignorance, poor education, religious intolerance, and xenophobia. Some jilted lovers committed suicide - which was considered by at least one judge to be an untreatable condition - while others were committed to the insane asylum, a fix-all, end-all cure for confused physicians of the day. It's clear that the doctors in the area knew nothing about Circadian cycles, or anything really, considering the number of people who were depressed and/or crazy, and another who was buried on accident. Of course, several conditions were lumped under what was called malignant diphtheria, something that led to the deaths among several children.
All of this is enough, but when superstition and religion brought about talk of witches, vexations, devils, Ouija boards, and something called the "criminal ear", it's understandable that there are problems with young people and to the town elders, just about everything is evil or crazy in some way.
With all of that said, there was some generally strange stuff happening during that time. Call it dementia, insanity, delirium, or just plain crazy, it's hard to explain the fact that during that short period of time there were multiple suicides, a man who tried to get a train to run him over, a man who took a nap and used lit dynamite as a pillow, widespread infidelity, multiple children who murdered relatives and locals with pistol shots, and several brutal murders of infants and toddlers - specifically a woman who drowned her children in a fit of insanity like Andrea Yates.
I can't say for sure why any of the events happened, and the documentary doesn't really go into an explanation, but if the past events and mass murderers Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer are an indication, there's either something in the water, or living in Wisconsin simply causes insanity. As a Chicago Bears fan, I'll go with the latter theory.
Tedious, Condescending...... January 21, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Description VERY Misleading February 2, 2007
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
Completely inaccurate and insipid July 1, 2005
9 out of 25 found this review helpful
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.
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