Wisconsin Death Trip

Presented by Cinemax and adapted from Michael Lesy’s book of the same title, true crime lovers and watchers of the real and macabre will bug-out big time at the shopping list of bad luck, ill fate and fatal superstition presented by this Hands On / BBC2 Arena documentary which concerns itself with a rash of strange suicides, murders and misdeeds committed around the town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin between the years 1890 and 1900.
 
All the ‘true’ cases and incidents are recited by Ian Holm, and read from the pages of a real town newspaper using the authentic old-timing syntax of editor Frank Cooper. Illustrated by using a mix of decent re-enactments and dozens of incredible photographs by Charles Van Schaik, it runs thru’ a decade long catalogue of 1st generation immigrant insanity which include hideous killings, mad self deletions, killer hobos, train wrecks, infanticide, patricide, matricide, arsonists and a coke addicted window smasher who travelled by train to shatter windows of distant towns while high.
 
Dark, disturbing and frequently bleak, it’s also blackly funny if ye chuckle at diphtheria, drowned families, satanism, hangings and depression.