SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Ploydsge just watch it!

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Leofwine_draca WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP is a one of a kind documentary experience that explores the odd series of violent deaths that plagued a rural Wisconsin town in the late 19th century. The filmmakers do away with the normal structure of a documentary - i.e. an explanatory narrative, talking head interviews and the like - to instead present a montage of reenactments showing these violent deaths in action.So the reader is subjected to an endless barrage of black and white footage of farmers shooting their wives, wives shooting their husbands, suicide, violent behaviour, and people carted off to the asylum. The cinematography is vivid, spooky and atmospheric, bringing to mind German expressionist cinema of the 1920s, but there's little real meat here and virtually no explanation or structure. I wanted to hear more from historians, from psychologists, to explain the bizarre phenomenon but if you're looking for answers, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP is oddly hollow. Watch it as a visual experience and a celebration of death, nothing more.

Roland-18-371976 If you make it halfway through this disturbing, fragmented barrage of glorified carnage, then you have to question your own sensitivities and lack of respect for the time in your life. Once you realize that this movie is going nowhere and has no point worthy of it's non stop ghastly images, it's time to stop honoring it's creator and find the off button! If the visuals don't drive you mad, the continuous drilling of your brain by the music score certainly will. Don't assume that this is a documentary worth watching. It is about as mature as the insane murderous 14 year old boy that it depicts. Worth zero stars. Please don't waste five minutes of your time.

zahno Beautiful shot, emotionally distant and utterly incoherent. What interested me in the film to begin with, the story of this small town and all of the bizarre misfortune it faced, turned out to not be true at all. But the film never freely admits this. The film moves between the B&W past and a living-color present. The present documents the town of Black River Falls exclusively, a small town in northern Wisconsin. So, when we flash back to the past, we are led to believe that all of the morbid events: murder, madness and mayhem, that we're hearing about occurred in or around Black River Falls. Perhaps some of it did occur in the immediate region, but more precisely, we're getting accounts of the morbid events from the Black River Falls NEWSPAPER. So we're talking about events all over the state, not in one small town! A girl drowned herself in the lake in Kenosha? Kenosha is near the Illinois border. Not to mention that other towns in the film: Appleton, Rhinelander, Eau Claire, LaCrosse, Beaver Dam, and Madison represent points at every corner of the state. Most people wouldn't realize this, but when you do, you know the rest of the film is based on a flimsy misrepresentation and it completely loses its coherence and what makes its initial premise compelling. If the timeframe were 10 years later, they might well have represented McKinley's assassination as taking place in Black River Falls, since the paper surely had a story about it. I didn't hate the film, it has some great imagery and some of the stories are interesting enough, but I felt cheated more than anything, because in the end, there's no real through-line and as such, not only no resolution but nothing to resolve.

tringwood A series of stories connected only due the violent nature, location and time. No context is given on if this time period was really more violent than others, or if this era was more violent in the nation at as a whole. Assuming this was abnormal there is no attempt to explain why this would take place. A very well done series of real life stories, sometimes a little graphic, with no context.