Wisconsin Death Trip

Quasi-interesting but hardly a movie. More like a series of creepily photographed, 2-minute (some less than that) vignettes about strange crimes and deaths in a small Wisconsin town, strung along for 80 minutes. The black-and-white photography was well done and the overall atmosphere worked, but it failed to affect me on any level (except for the hushed whisper of one of its narrators...that guy gave me the willies).

Creepy and memorable, but oddly paced and not enough to rate an hour and a half. The Window Smasher was awesome, though.

While some of the editing and storytelling devices are questionable and sometimes ineffective, there are some genuinely unsettling scenes and stories. Worth seeing.

A surreal and entrancing blend of documentary and well-shot reenactments (with embellishments here and there, no doubt) detailing a small town and its surrounding counties suffering from a seemingly collective insanity around the dawn of the 20th century. It's the sort of off-kilter slice of Americana's underbelly through British eyes that would make a great - if largely depressing - double feature with Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

There’s something a bit annoying about this, which consists essentially in reading out some tabloid headlines (and a few snippets from the stories themselves), and which it seems the viewer is supposed to consider elevated to art by a variety of music (in the Ken Burns style), the narrator’s slightly ironic tone, and, most importantly of all, the fact that the events occurred a century ago. Even the juxtaposition with contemporary events is a little grating: a bit too easy, perhaps?

Unique flick, part documentary part folk Gothic horror movie.

The subject matter is interesting, the movie, not so much. It's just a dreamy listing of crime, death, and insanity in small-town Wisconsin. There's no real structure here, and the confused clips from the modern inhabitants of Black River Falls muddy things up. I hadn't heard of the book before though, this material presented in book form would probably be better.

Crazy!

Pretty decent low-budget adaptation of great book.

If you've read the book before you know what you're getting in to. I liked that it kept the books style of telling you what you were about to hear about. While it is only a small sample size compared to the amount of stories in the book, the choices are fairly interesting and do a good job of being a version of Black River Falls - The Greatest Hits.