TARTARUS
dir. Dave Wascavage, 2005
United States. 77 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4 - MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 - 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15 - 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29 - 10 PM

Where madness and death live

While Fungicide is an unabashedly good-bad SOV horror flick, Wascavage proves he’s more than a master of schlock with his follow up Tartarus.

It loosely follows one man’s slow descent into madness (or journey through hell) but to summarize this film would not do it justice. A largely one-man show, Tartarus toggles back and forth between gonzo torture at the hands of an alien (or demon?) on a ramshackle spaceship, and John’s evil escapades in life prior to endless torture.

Tartarus is a singular experience, hard to describe and wholly immersive in ways feature films with infinitely higher budgets can only dream of achieving - as one Spectacle volunteer put it, “look past the no-fi aesthetics and dogshit cgi and what you're left with is just some genuinely excellent visual storytelling. This vortex of an anti-narrative, dragging you down deeper and deeper into its oneiric alien hellscape before spitting you out at the same place you started, now rendered entirely unfamiliar. Truly don't even know if there's anything I can reasonably compare it to. Maybe BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL by way of EVENT HORIZON? De sade by way of Heaven's Gate? Felt like an unholy act just watching it. Already dying to revisit it.”