“All you need is mobility and life beyond this boring room and the limitations of this stupid computer. I, my love, will give you that freedom. I will give you a brain. I will give you immortality!”
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. 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.
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Yet Gunther’s words here come with a metacinematic resonance. 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. 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.”
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. 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. 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.
