Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) Review

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) Review

 

Once upon a time, there was a teenage boy named Michael (Paul Walker) and a teenage girl named Tammy (Denise Richards) and they were in love, but one night Tammy’s jealous, psychopathic ex-boyfriend beat up Michael and left him in an animal preserve, where he was brutally mauled by a lion. Tammy was very sad, but luckily a mad scientist kidnapped Michael from the hospital and transplanted his brain into a robotic Tyrannosaurus rex. The previously kind, courteous Michael then went on a gory rampage in his new body, and later reunited with Tammy, who tried to protect him from the police. Though the police eventually shot him down in a barn, Michael’s brain was later hooked up to a computer with a video camera, and Michael and Tammy lived happily ever after.

Just checking in: are you still with me?

This is a real movie, by the way, and it was made because the director knew someone who had access to a robotic T-rex. There was a catch, though: this guy could only use the T-rex for two weeks before it had to be taken to a Texas park, so he whipped up the script in a week. I’ll give him the tiniest bit of credit for making the T-rex in the movie an actual robotic one, instead of trying to pass it off as if it were real. In that detail, the movie doesn’t try and fail—but it is only in that very tiny detail that I can say this. The rest of the movie is a totally baffling experience, which seems to have been at least partially intentional, but it’s one of those movies that is so bad it becomes funny for all the wrong reasons.

Tammy and the T-Rex is usually classified as a science fiction comedy, but it’s not. It’s unclassifiable. Sometimes it’s comedic, sometimes it’s horrifically violent, and sometimes it’s both at the same time, but it is wholly absurd. It was made with the intent of being an R-rated comedy-horror, but even in those terms it’s a failure. It’s not that consistently funny (intentionally) nor is it scary, but it does have some intense, gory moments with the T-rex killing people. The distributors thought the movie would be more marketable if it had a PG-13 rating and aimed more for teen audiences, so it was re-edited (rather clumsily) before release, and for a long time that was the only version most people knew about. Then came along the “Gore Cut” in 2019 which reinstated all those violent moments, as well as the swearing and bit of sexual content that had put it at an R before, and this is the version you have to see. It is truly jarring to go from scenes of teens partying to a T-rex massacring those teens and then back to silly antics with Denise Richards trying to reunite with her boyfriend, even though he’s now a mechanical Mesozoic monstrosity.

Denise Richards tried way too hard in this role. Seeing her weep over the corpse of a dead robotic dinosaur that has her boyfriend’s brain inside is beyond bizarre. Wait a minute, did I just say dead robotic dinosaur? It was never alive in the first place! It makes absolutely no sense. This is dinosaur schlock filmmaking at its finest. It makes Carnosaur look like Jurassic Park. It is easily one of the worst movies ever made to feature a dinosaur. The robotic T-rex is slow and stiff, the few shots of it shown in full are laughable, and its famously short arms can stretch to whatever length they need to from scene to scene. As for the rest of the movie, I’m not even sure what to comment on. The worst aspects are the blatant homophobia and exploitative ending, but some of it is almost impossible to explain. One of my favourite parts is when Tammy and her gay friend are raiding the morgue for a new human body for Michael while he (in T-rex form) is out in the back of a big truck parked on the street, and they hold up the corpses to the window so he can see them and give them a thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether or not the body is to his liking.

In the past I’ve reviewed schlock films that are so hard to grasp I’m at a loss as to whether or not I would recommend them, and this is one of those cases yet again. It certainly isn’t even close to the strangest movie I’ve seen, but it is up there in the category of those “what were they thinking?” kinds of movies, and in the end I think someone who likes good-bad movies as well as gory movies might be entertained by its insane premise and highly questionable execution (but don't bother if you can only find the gore-less cut). When the weird fact that it stars not just one but two actors who would later both star in the forgotten Dane Cook comedy Employee of the Month over a decade later is like weird fact #2386 on the weird facts list for this movie, way at the bottom of the list, you know you’re in for an unequivocal movie-viewing experience.