Tammy and the T-Rex

There are 2 kinds of bad dinosaur movies; the painful ones and the fun ones. This is one of the latter. I think Tammy and the T-Rex was kind of destined to be a guilty pleasure of mine from the very beginning. It hits so many notes for things I enjoy and resonate with, most of them subjective, that I just can't help but love it. I love the 90s culture, I love dinosaurs, I love camp, I love Terry Kiser, I love Denise Richards and I love Beauty & the Beast stories. I was also a leather jacket wearing dork in High School who briefly dated a cheerleader at one point and have a flamboyantly gay close friend. This movie has all of those things and you're telling me I'm not supposed to enjoy it? Yeah, right.

God damn it, I don't care that the editing is laughably bad, with audio clips repeating themselves and scenes frequently ending abruptly and awkwardly. I don't care that the story makes absolutely no sense, I don't care if the film obviously uses a human actor in an obvious $20 costume whenever Michael/T-Rex needs to use his hands or we need a closeup on his moving feet, I don't care that the cast overacts to a degree that John Travolta would be envious of (Actually, this may be a bonus.) I don't care that the music feels like something off of a bad Power Rangers episode. Honestly, the only thing I really care about is the film's censoring of its graphic and brutal violence. The cuts here are obvious and laughable, made for the sole creative decision of marketing to a dinosaur hungry young audience fresh off of Jurassic Park. Never mind that these are 2 completely different movies targeted towards completely different target audiences, apparently all dinosaur movies are the same. While Tammy & the T-Rex still retains a lot of the zany, bonkers humor and manic, over-the-top energy of the original vision, stripping it of its violence just makes it lose a lot of its identity.

I'm surprised how much I really dug the characters of this film. No, the acting isn't the best (Or the 2nd best...Or the 3rd best...Or the 26th best), but I do really like these characters. Denise Richard's Tammy is lovably bubbly and energetic, Theo Forsett's Byron is charming and funny, Paul Walker's Michael is a lot of goofy fun in the limited screentime he has and Terry Kiser chews the scenery as one of those deliciously overacted bad guys we just never get to see any more. I was surprised how emotionally invested I was in this admittedly horribly made film.

A big part of my enjoyment comes from just how much heart this film has. This is the kind of bad movie where everybody on board really believed in the product. Everybody in the cast & crew really wanted to be here and you can tell they had a lot of fun. You can't help but respect the earnestness and humbleness of a movie with a crying T-Rex attending his own funeral. A movie that starts off with a cheer-leading team practicing to "Dinosaur Man" by Simon Stokes and the Black Whip Thrill Band (A song with lyrics like Dinosaur music inside my brain, Sometimes I feel like I'm gonna go insane") It's a very charming movie if nothing else and nobody can take that away from it. Not even repeating sound clips or a T-Rex with obviously human arms.

This joins Idle Hands as one of those insane 90s guilty pleasures that I would honestly love to remake. Turn it into a Troma Entertainment style Horror comedy exploitation like Tromeo & Juliet, Polutrygeist or Class of Nuke 'Em High and this could honestly be really good for the kind of ridiculous, absurd, goofy schlock that it is. Come to mention it, taking the stoner comedy elements of Idle Hands would probably make this even more entertaining. I wonder how much it would take to purchase the rights for this.

I bought this film merely because of Denise Richards, who I think is one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. I was deceived by the title and the picture, both of which made me think it was a movie for children. Boy, was I wrong. This is a Trash movie, what made me glad that I bought it. Now I can place it among the other titles of my B-Movies collection. Is this a bad movie? Of course it is. Surprisingly as it may be for most people, it was made that way ON PURPOSE. And, what may sound even more surprising is that some people (such as myself) really do appreciate this genre of film. Trash, B-movie, whatever you call it, are based in 4 concepts: Hot chick (Denise Richards couldn't be more appropriate), bad acting, cheesy special effects and a ridiculous script. This movie succeeds in all of them.

Thus, considering the logic of those who are into Trash movies, this one deserves an 8 or 9 out of 10. For the rest of you, who just can't get what is to enjoy in a truly bad movie, I guess it would be 1 out of 10, considering a conventional rating system.

I was channel surfing the other night on DirectTV, and came across this movie with the wacky title. When I read the nutty plot description and noticed that it starred Ellen Dubin (from Lexx) and Denise Richards in an early role, I selected it out of curiosity. I expected to watch it for maybe five minutes and then get bored and turn to something else. I ended up, however, being really surprised by how entertaining I found this film to be. I knew I had to see what other people at IMDb thought about it. And just as I expected, almost everyone here hated it. I'm not surprised that most people don't "get" this movie. Those without any sense of camp will have no appreciation for it.

Let me explain something to everyone: This movie is bad, and the people who wrote and directed it KNEW that they were making a bad movie. Most of the characters and things that go on in it are totally, utterly ridiculous, and the filmmakers obviously reveled in this fact, to a degree of aggressive silliness. Realism and reality have little to do with this film. Basically, it's a send-up of other B-movies--romance, sci-fi, horror, etc--and a clever one at that. But apparently very few seem to have recognized it as such. Do people really think that the filmmakers were just too dumb not to realize that real-life funeral-goers would have noticed a huge T-rex watching the burial service from behind some shrubs just a few yards away? Or that the creepiness of the tender love scenes between Tammy and her grotesque dinosaur "boyfriend" was an accident? The movie's deliberate outrageousness and low-mindedness is what makes this movie fun and is the source of some of its funniest moments. For the first half of the film, I couldn't believe what I was watching, and couldn't believe that anyone would make a film like this.

And then I loved it!

I saw the uncut version of this film at an independent theatre tonight, and let me just say: this film is as bad as Troll 2, and much more entertaining. The whole theatre was laughing throughout, and I am definitely planning on making my friends watch this. I cannot speak for the value of the cut version, as I have not seen it and cannot imagine how the film would function in that state. 10/10 for entertainment value, 0/10 for artistic value; don't watch this if you plan to take it at all seriously.

I was up at an unearthly hour (2:30 am) and turned on the television. Much to my dismay, this movie was the best thing on. I hesitate to use the word "best", but even more strongly hesitate to use the word "movie". I must admit that at that hour, almost anything would be entertaining, but I feel like I lost a significant amount of brain cells after watching that...thing. It was, in a word, bizarre. I can't think of any other way to describe it in an even remotely positive manner. The humor was quirky, but misguided, and the acting was horrendous. I'm positive that Denise Richards now weeps whenever she hears anything related to dinosaurs. Let's just say that it wasn't her finest hour. But, by all means, see this movie. It will give you far greater respect for the oscar nominees.