Tar

Tar is about the Greenwoods, who have just lost their family business, and their office building is going to be demolished for a new subway system. A somber night of packing up turns into a menacing game of survival for the Greenwoods, and other office employees, when construction awakens an ancient creature lurking under the La Brea Tar Pit.

Barry Greenwood (Timothy Bottoms) is the owner of a family business and is losing it all. His relationship with his son Zach (Aaron Wolf) isn’t the best, and losing the company isn’t helping a thing, other than giving them time apart. The night of the eviction, Barry, Zach, and others are all packed up and ready to move on… but something won’t let them go so easily. The building loses all power, then each of the office employees begins to feel that something is after them.

“…construction awakens an ancient creature lurking under the La Brea Tar Pit.”

Aaron Wolf does some good and not so good things with Tar. Let’s state the positives first. I liked that this film is loosely based on Native American folklore as it describes how they would use tar as an adhesive with their canoes and other handmade items. It is explained that they would go to the tar pit until some of them were found dead there. The natives forbid anyone from going to the pits at night because they feared it’s evil spirit. Since then, the only one not to be covered by skyscraping buildings is the La Brea Tar Pit, which helps the story’s setting make sense because of its history.

Where there are monsters, there is often death that follows, and the deaths in Tar are quite gruesome. The deaths range from faces being ripped off to stomaches being skewed. What is also a great thing about the monster is that it is mostly done with practical effects – something that is missing in modern horror films.