Wisconsin Death Trip
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DVD details
Actor: Ian Holm, Jeffrey Golden, Jo Vukelich, John Schneider (III), Marilyn WhiteBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Anamorphic, Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 76 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-02-24
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Home Vision Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Wisconsin Death Trip
DVD Review: Boring
Summary: 2 Stars
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.
Description of Wisconsin Death Trip
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