There is a disjointedness to the film that makes it hard to follow if you’re actually trying to take it somewhat seriously. I guess my biggest gripe is that the pacing is really odd and sometimes you are just pulled along for the ride and it isn’t even all that clear as to what’s happening on screen. There’s not much of anything to dislike but even for all of its positives, it does fall kind of flat for me. You like just about all of the characters and it’s highly energetic. Watching it now, I did enjoy it but it just doesn’t connect for me in the right way. But I didn’t have a nostalgic fondness for it like I do similar pictures.
I remember it being on TV a lot when I was a kid and I watched it all the time. I have weird memories of The Ice Pirates. “I’m afraid I have some bad news… well maybe its not that bad. JF Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 91 Minutes Roberts, Anjelica Huston, Ron Perlman, Bruce Vilanch, John Carradine, John Matuszak, Carmen Filpi Tammy and the T-Rex is available now (in its fully restored “Gore Cut”) on Blu-ray from 101 Films on their Black Label.Written by: Stewart Raffill, Stanford ShermanĬast: Robert Urich, Mary Crosby, Michael D. It might not quite have achieved immortality, but we are still talking about Raffilll’s horny low-budget campfest a quarter of a century later. “Going to screw your brains,” says Tammy at the film’s end – and that is exactly what this mind-messing movie does. But there is an oddness, an in-your-face inconsistency, to the tone and texture here that is all Raffill’s own, making this one of the ’90s weirder UFOs. Ultimately Tammy & the T-Rex comes closest to the gonzo style of John Hughes’ Weird Science or Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead. There are ‘testicular standoffs’, interspecies romance, comedy cops, and other wild excursions, and it all climaxes in a seductive striptease that is strictly ‘no touching’. Now in control of the robot dinosaur, Michael goes on a destructive rampage against Billy and his gang, while Tammy and her gay black sidekick Byron (Theo Forsett) search graves and the morgue for a more human body to accommodate Michael’s consciousness. After Michael is left for dead in a wildlife reserve (don’t ask) by Tammy’s controlling ex Billy (George Pilgrim), Gunther does not hesitate to abduct the comatose jock, sawing open his skull for a brain transplant. Tammy is played by a pre-Starship Troopers, pre-Wild Things, pre-Bond Denise Richards, while her boyfriend Michael is played by a pre-Fast & Furious Paul Walker. In 2019, Vinegar Syndrome restored the unexpurgated version – the so-called ‘Gore Cut’ – whose heroine is credited as ‘Tanny’ and whose title is Tanny & The Teenage T-Rex. Stitching together elements from ’60s B-movie sci-fi, the high-school movie, the revenge flick, gross-out comedy and the previous year’s Jurassic Park, it comes with a confused identity – confused even more by the surgical excision of some six minutes of blood, guts, gore and profanity for its original US theatrical and home release in a bid to make it appeal more to the family market.
This is the paradox of Tammy and the T-Rex: it is utterly dumb, but smart enough to know just that and while no gag is too low for its brand of anything-goes screwball, it really does bring a lumbering kind of life to its hybrid collection of ill-fitting ideas. Maybe – although Raffill also had enough self-awareness to make Wachenstein’s computer-savvy technician Bobby (John Franklin) quietly dismiss his boss’ grand ambitions with the comment: “What a crock of shit.”
For Stewart Raffill (The Ice Pirates, The Philadelphia Experiment, Mac and Me) was offered, out of the blue, the use of an animatronic tyrannosaur for a specific two-week period, and while the writer/director could sniff opportunity, he had very little time in which to throw together a screenplay that would flesh out this giant moving prop with a plot, with brains, and maybe with the kind of immortality that box office success can bring. Yet Gunther’s words here come with a metacinematic resonance. A Frankenstein-like mad scientist par excellence, if somewhat out of place and time in mid-’90s California, Gunther hopes to create a lucrative franchise of cybernetic body frames that will house the brains of the otherwise dead, whether humans or pets, and this T-Rex is his improbable prototype.
The speaker is the priapic, chain-smoking Dr Gunther Wachenstein (Terry Kiser), addressing the robotic dinosaur that he keeps in a warehouse and hopes to animate with a human brain transplant.