Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

borginla1 So what's so wrong with this movie? First, It was as if they didn't have enough content to make the needed length(90 minutes?), so they filled it full of dead space and useless shots, and still only got it to 76 minutes! Really, If you hacked out all of the useless non-related footage it would probably only run about 35 minutes! Second, whenever something interesting did come up, they skipped right past it, giving us almost no information at all. Third, what was up with that annoying 'whisper like' voice over! I swear, every time that annoying voice came on, I wanted to reach right through the screen and pull the guys tongue out! In fact this was so bad that it got me to post my first ever movie review on this or any site. So please, learn from my mistake, don't waste your time or money on this lousy film. Cause if you don't, you may find yourself doing the exact same thing I'm finishing with right now.

Jonathan Ley This is a truly amazing piece of work. Creepy and bizarre yet always humane. Firstly, yes it is a documentary. But a documentary does not have to be some guy following his subject with a camera. The verity form of documentary film-making is a great and valid one but it is not right for every subject and it is not the only documentary form. Marsh's film is a hybrid between documentary and fiction film-making. He uses dramatic reconstructions skillfully, inter cutting with contemporary, reportage material. The film is a series of snapshots, reports of bizarre events, murders, suicides and strange customs taken from contemporaneous newspaper reports of the time. It aims to provide an alternative view of an area's history by looking beneath the surface at the strange footnotes of history which somehow frequently manage to get lost in the history books. And it is absolutely stunning to look at. The dramatic reconstructions are shot in dreamlike black and white, filmed to mirror the technical conventions of the time. The contemporary footage is similarly beautiful - a filmed photo story of the town today. The film is stunning enough on its own terms but when you consider that they shot all this on a low, TV documentary budget it becomes awe-inspiring. As to the dramatic structure, the film makes it quite clear at the beginning that the stories took place between 1890 and 1900. The use of the five chapters themed by the seasons (it, tellingly, begins and ends in Winter) is intended to link the stories thematically and by subject matter. It is like the ages of man - the early stories involve children, then adolescents, then adults, then old people, etc... True, the blurb on the DVD box is slightly misleading - it suggests that the film will unravel the mystery of why all these things happened in this one town and its surrounding areas. That is not Marsh's fault and his film should not be criticised for not delivering what it never intended to. It is instead a record of some truly strange happenings. Why did they happen? Why does weird stuff continue to happen? In his highly enlightening commentary Marsh explains that he was interested in drawing parallels between then and now and I think his film exceeds in doing this brilliantly. It is a great idea, to examine life by looking at the ways in which we die. Wisconsin Death Trip is a sad, strange, beautiful, disturbing and blackly comic little masterpiece and I urge you to check it out.

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.

Oslo Jargo (Bartok Kinski) I expected this piece of work to at least stimulate the thirst for information but it was so dull I could not sit through it. An amateurish director, payed by numerous corporations and public interests from Wisconsin, makes this seem like an important piece of art, well, do not be fooled, this is worse than a student film. Incoherent and useless vignettes, read by a half mumbling Swede (Ian Holm) narrate what there is of a "plot". There's about 140 "death vignettes" and they are all boring. "Mary Jane shot her two year old son and then ate his guts," begins one story and it is never mentioned again. Big deal, so people killed themselves, there were no ghosts or supernatural things at work, people were miserable in that day, as they are today but the director does nothing to get us interested, he intercuts the film with contemporary society, showing nothing but white people in small town America, an utter bore. He hired a bunch of immature actors who stage the bits in segments, and they are all filmed in black and white, what a waste of film this was. At 1 hour and 15 mins, this is way TOO long and should be forwarded to the end.