The Ultra-Violent R rated cut of 1994's Tammy and the T-Rex is Pure Pulp Bliss

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’m deep into a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.

This column has afforded me a wonderful opportunity to finally experience and write about bonkers cult movies I’ve been curious about but might never see without a concrete assignment to do so.

I’m talking about movies like Tammy and the T-Rex, a movie I vaguely remember from my days as a video store clerk that roared back to life last year when trash specialists Vinegar Syndrome released a DVD and Blu-Ray of the dinosaursploitation cheapie that restored all of the gratuitous gore that was excised from its original American release for the sake of appealing to a family audience. 

Tammy and the T-Rex bizarre journey to infamy began when a wealthy theater owner approached Mac & Me auteur Stewart Raffill with a curious proposition. The gentleman had access to an impressive animatronic T-Rex for two weeks before it was shipped off to Texas and wanted to know if Raffill could make a movie with his robo-dino before a very thin window of opportunity passed. 

In a frenzy of inspiration, Raffill hatched a fever dream scenario involving a high school jock whose brain ends up inside a mechanical T-Rex. The rampaging teenage robo-dinosaur then enacts gruesome, gloriously gratuitous vengeance on the bullies who literally tossed him into the lion’s den, woos his distraught girlfriend Tammy (Denise Richards) AND tries to find a new body for his brain that will allow him to make sweet, sweet love to Tammy.

Tammy and the T-Rex was written and shot as a profane, sexually charged, perversely morbid R rated gore fest but somewhere along the line the gore was cut for the sake of a PG-13 rating. 

The original, brutal and bloody version of Tammy and the T-Rex played abroad but up until last year we Americans had to settle for the watered down version without all the Fangoria-friendly kills and enthusiastic viscera-ripping. And that, friends, is not just a goddamn shame: it’s downright unAmerican. 

As Americans we deserve ALL of the gore. We deserve all of the  head chomps and stomach-ripping. We deserve Tammy and the T-Rex in all of its perversity and brutality. We deserve the true Tammy and the T-Rex, not some baby version where they cut away before all of the good parts. 

Thankfully we Americans now have the real Tammy and the T-Rex on Blu-Ray, DVD and through the Shudder streaming service, and it is every bit the unhinged delight I hoped it would be. 

The real Tammy and the T-Rex was not released specifically for the purpose of single-handedly getting us through this awful pandemic but that’s the role it’s destined to end up playing all the same. 

Tammy and the T-Rex opens with an unforgettably shitty dinosaur-themed rock song (foreshadowing!) accompanying the sensual thrusting and grinding of the titular Tammy (Denise Richards).

Football player Mike (Paul Walker) pines for Tammy but she keeps him at arm’s length because she’s worried her psychotic ex-boyfriend Billy (George Pilgrim) will be so jealous and unhinged that he will legit murder Mike if he knows he’s interested in her.

Tammy and the T-Rex consistently makes choices that aren’t just unusual or unexpected so much as they are utterly, exquisitely insane, like having Billy grab Mike’s dick, and then have Mike grab Billy’s dick until the comic relief cops have to separate them after chuckling beforehand, “What we have hear is one of them testicular standoffs!” 

Billy REALLY does not like the idea of the handsome jock hitting on Tammy so he hits him with a bat, sticks him in the trunk of his car and then dumps his body in a wildlife preserve so that he can be torn apart by the razor-sharp teeth and claws of a full-grown lion. 

That, friends, seems VERY excessive, overkill in every sense. After having his muscular young body shredded by a big cat, Mike lingers in a state between life and death before mad scientist Dr. Gunther Wachenstein (Terry Kiser) decides to stick the young man’s brain into a mechanical T-Rex. 

Why? I’m not entirely sure. To put things in Jurassic Park terms, the mad scientist of Tammy and the T-Rex was so preoccupied with whether or not he could stick a teenager’s brain inside a mechanical dinosaur, he didn't stop to think about if he should stick a teenager’s brain inside a mechanical dinosaur. 

Weekend at Bernie’s star Terry Kiser is so excited to be playing a non-corpse that he gets a little carried away. Then again, there’s no point bothering with nuance or understatement when playing a deranged doc who thinks sticking the cerebellums of high school students in robo-dinosaurs is the key to fame and fortune.

After being bashed with a bat, tossed in the trunk of a car and mauled by a lion, poor Mike’s body suffers yet another indignity when the strip mall Dr. Frankenstein and his half-ass Igors saw open the unfortunate young man’s skull, pop out his brain, then stick it in a mechanical dinosaur. 

The sentient dinosaur then embarks on a blood-soaked, carnage-filled rampage that finds him taking fatal revenge against the bullies who tossed him to the lions, and the many, many people who looked on and laughed because, c’mon, if you’re a teenager, nothing is funnier than some dude you have nothing against getting eaten by a wild animal.

The carnage here is so gloriously gratuitous that it’s easy to see how it could literally all be cut without rendering the film incoherent. There’s something gleefully homemade about the gore effects that extends to the wildly, deliberately excessive film itself.

After at least some of his bloodlust is satiated, Mike the Dino then sets about winning his girlfriend back. That’s no small feat considering he’s now a dinosaur who communicates in roars rather than words. Yet Mike somehow manages to convey to Tammy that he’s now a dinosaur through a combination Charades, body language and inside jokes. 

Acting poses many challenges. None is greater, of course, than having to breathe truth and art and life into a scene where you come to slowly realize that your seemingly dead boyfriend’s brain now inhabits the body of a mechanical Tyrannosaurus after he somehow manages to convey that information just by wiggling his tiny little T-Rex arms around. 

Richards absolutely crushes this scene. The ache, the longing, the confusion about her ostensibly deceased soulmate being alive but also now a robotic dinosaur: it’s all there.

Richards isn’t the only thespian emoting up a storm here. Like Huckleberry Finn, Mike ends up in the surreal position of watching his own funeral. Unlike Mark Twain’s famous creation, however, he does so from the vantage point of the mechanical T-Rex hosting his brain. 

Tammy and her screamingly effeminate gay black best friend/sidekick Byron (Theo Forsett) at first attempt to reunite Mike with his hunky young body but when they dig up his grave and maggots and rats crawl out of his skull they decide they need to come up with a plan B, despite lacking the very specific skill set needed to put a living brain into people and machines. 

Byron is the film’s sassy comic relief and a fascinatingly ambiguous figure.While Byron is unmistakably a big, broad, brassy stereotype of a screaming queen, with the exception of some redneck cops, who make some homophobic comments, everyone in the film accepts and/or aggressively embraces Byron and his flamboyance. 

Like everything in Tammy and the T-Rex, Byron is entirely too much by design though he does breathe life and passion into dialogue like, “You can’t do that! That’s my friend’s brain in that dinosaur!”

Tammy and the T-Rex ends as it begins: pervy and bizarre. This singular motion picture experience (and it really is an experience) concludes with Mike’s disembodied brain hooked up to a video camera so he can see and appreciate his sexy girlfriend’s erotic, film-ending striptease.

I’m not sure how, but Mike gets a raging brain boner from his hot girlfriend’s sizzling moves. The late, lamented Walker uses his voice, and only his voice, to convey that a dude whose brain recently inhabited the skull of a murderous mechanical Dino really wants to bone his girlfriend as soon as that becomes a possibility. 

In a previous Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry I argued that Sam Peckinpah’s transcendently trashy CB trucker comedy Convoy was the greatest film of all time. I was wrong. Tammy and the T-Rex is actually the greatest film of all time because it has something essential that all other films lack, namely, a mad scientist sticking a high school jock’s brain inside an alternately horny and bloodthirsty mechanical dinosaur. 

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