There are times a person describes to you a movie and you scratch your head pondering if this can really be a film. Maybe your pal fell asleep and had a fever dream until the lights came up during the credits. There’s no way this was really a film. Which naturally leads to the prompt response of “Are you kidding me?” followed immediately with “how do I see this?” Such should be your natural reaction when you discover there is a movie called Tammy And The T-Rex from 1994 which is far from the usual boy meet girl story. It’s the kind of outrageous cinema that rarely shows up on movie screens that are dominated by flicks that safely exploit intellectual property for corporations. Even more important is that this bizarre indie film featured the early work of two stars that would become huge names on the silver screen. Tammy And The T-Rex became legendary thank to USA’s Up All Night.
Tammy (Wild Things‘ Denise Richards) is a high school cheerleader who has just started dating football star Michael (The Fast and the Furious‘s Paul Walker). The trouble is her old boyfriend punker Billy (Timemaster‘s George Pilgrim). He ain’t done with her and even though he has restraining order to keep him off the campus, he shows up and fights Michael. She doesn’t want Billy back. Across town in a warehouse, a mechanical dinosaur robot is put through its tests. The backers love what they have except because it requires so much computer power, the robot can’t move around and behave like a real live dinosaur. Mad scientist Dr. Wachenstein (Weekend At Bernie‘s Terry Kiser) puts his mind to the problem and figures out they need a fresh brain as the robot dinosaur’s CPU. But where will they get one? Turns out Tammy invites Michael to sneak into her bedroom and the jealous Billy ruins the young love scene. He and his goons beat up Michael and drag him out into the night. Instead of killing his rival, he drops him off at a nature park and let a lion finish his dirty work. This leads to Dr. Wachenstein’s stealing Michael’s body from the hospital and performing the first human brain transplant into a robot T-Rex. In his new body, Michael goes after revenge on Billy and his gang.
Tammy And The T-Rex is brilliant weirdness. The title seems to make no sense. How does a girl hook up with a T-Rex? But then when you find out that the dinosaur is a robot, it all makes sense. Well sense enough that you can sit back and watch the strangest high school movie in the ’90s that involves a robot dinosaur with a hot girlfriend. The cast brings a lot to the spoof sense of the action. Denise Richards was about to hit pay dirt with Starship Troopers that would lead to her Bond Girl turn in The World Is Not Enough. Paul Walker would be on the path to fame after overcoming the stigma of Meet The Deedles. Of course he would later have tragedy in the middle of making all those Fast and Furious blockbusters. Theo Forsett deserves more notice as the sheriff’s son who is Tammy’s best friend. He’s keeps up the comic action. He recently appeared on an episode of The Rookie.
What’s extra important is that the version of Tammy And The T-Rex on the DVD is the 91 minute unrated cut and not the 82 minute PG-13 variation that ended up on VHS. The producers snipped out a bunch of gory moments in order to sell this as a kid film. The cut makes the film far superior to any of the Jurassic Park films. Tammy And The T-Rex is as weird as the title.
The video is 1.85:1 anamorphic. The transfer looks great. You get a sense of the youth in Denise Richards and the wrinkles on the T-Rex. The audio is Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. The film sounds fine for a low budget feature. The movie is subtitled in English.
Trailer (2:02) seems to be the trailer you’d see when renting a different VHS tape. This is all about the T-Rex wanting to be a party animal.
MVD Rewind Collection presents Tammy And The T-Rex. Directed by: Stewart Raffill. Screenplay by: Stewart Raffill and Gary Brockette. Starring: Denise Richards, Paul Walker, Terry Kiser, George ‘Buck’ Flower, John F. Goff, Sean Whalen, Efren Ramirez. Rated: Unrated. Running Time: 91 minutes. Released: July 15, 2025.
