Clevercell Very disappointing...

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

flower820 I found this documentary to be pointless and useless. The only part I enjoyed about this film was the "flashbacks" to current times in Black River Falls, WI because it is my hometown. Even though the film is about WI's history and Black River Falls, I found it to be boring and uninformative. Watching the film made me feel as if I were insane because I am from BRF. The historical viewpoint was interesting, but it seemed as if the film was saying that WI breeds insanity. I think living in a place with a very small population and little to do would drive me crazy as well. I couldn't find much of a point in the film either.

bmyatt_uk Wisconsin death trip is not really a film that can be accused of being "entertaining." entertainment implies that you will sit their gripped by the story and enthralled by the narrative, and this can be applied to most documentaries, such as Bowling for Columbine or Spellbound.However, Wisconsin death trip is not most documentaries. there is no narrative or story. instead, we are given a litany of deaths and events in the life of a small town in Wisconsin, USA. obviously, this is not going to be the happiest of films.filmed in a soft black and white, with the exception of some shots of the town in modern times, we are given an insight into the strange events and deaths in the - whose name I forget ^_^;; - over the course of four different seasons. for some reason, I found this film to be strangely compelling. whilst not having a huge running time, it gave me a morbid curiosity that kept me watching. strangely enough, you do start wanting to see what could possibly happen next in this small town. In conclusion, whilst it is a slow-paced film, it can be compelling if you let it, and by the end you're wondering how many strange deaths one area can actually suffer.7/10.

sixtwentysix While I was excited at the prospect of a turn of the century documentary about Wisconsin history this disappoints. With all the skill of a boorish film school dropout, this film goes for 'shocking' gusto showing what is an entirely misleading portrait of a small town and state. First things first, the movie is not about exclusively Black River Falls as the film implies with its opening montage. The film purports to be about a sleepy Wisconsin town with little industry or population but ends up being more of a mix of Wisconsin crime history spanning ten years. This effort I'm sure looked wonderful on paper but James Marsh quite obviously does not have the talent to bring this idea to life. While I've no other experience with James Marsh's work, I got the feeling that this film was made for or by the cynical bohemian sitting in a film house sniggering at the 'pathetic' lives of average, normal Midwestern folk. Perched in their lofty lives, looking down on the simple folk blissfully toiling, unaware of the horror they exist in. The film's sense of humor is as joyless and tedious as anything in my recent memory.Personally speaking, the only humorous attributes of WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP were the tired methods used setting mood. Using songs not remotely of the era, grating cinematic technique, repetitive scenes, the cliché' whispering doctor and the disembodied 'scary' voice telling you of all the 'horrors' of the age. None of the items presented were particularly shocking, nor were they to be unexpected. Ten years ANYWHERE in the world will yield the same results regarding crime. A poor man shot his creditor? Wow, you don't say. A man shot his wife after he catches her cheating? No way! A farmer that lives alone hears voices? Nay I tell you nay! Crazy Norwegian customs!? Stop the press. Padded beyond belief this film presents what could have been discussed in 10-20 minutes into a grueling 76 minutes of schlock tripe. What you're left with is an extremely worthless wooden nickel attempting to make the ordinary seem extraordinary and the only thing amazing about this film is how badly it fails. Avoid this documentary.

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.