The existence of the movie Tammy and the T-Rex, starring Denise Richards and Paul Walker, seems like one of those pieces of internet lore that everyone on the cool message boards already knew about (and didn’t tell me), but the YouTube video only has 11,000 views when it should have at least 11 million, so I’m considering it a Forgotten Classic for our purposes.
Directed by Mac & Me‘s Stewart Raffil, who should get some kind of bizarre-movie lifetime achievement award for these two titles alone, Tammy and the T-Rex stars a pre-breast implants Denise Richards and a be-bellyshirted Paul Walker in those heady days of 1994. It has a plot that I could try to explain, but I think I’d rather just copy the trailer narration word for word, because this is like dada-ist poetry:
Everything in Tammy’s life is just great. But when you’re young and in love, life can get VERY complicated.
(*cut to shot of Paul Walker eating a rose*) [Note: It is never explained why Paul Walker is eating a rose]
ESPECIALLY when it involves an INSANELY JEALOUS creep.
(*cut to a fight, including the line “DO it, Billy! Do it!”, which belongs in every film*)
Late night phone calls. Sneaking around in your own house. Your boyfriend getting dumped in a wild animal park. And a crazy doctor… who turns out to be a MAD SCIENTIST.
…with an insane invention, that only needs a brain.
But THIS Tyrannosaurus Rex just wants to be a PARTY ANIMAL.
This narration should be in a museum.
Even when you TELL THE TRUTH, nobody believes you anymore.
Mad Scientist screaming: I WILL GIVE YOU IMMORTALITY!
Not if TAMMY has anything to say about it!
So, from what I can piece together – and the plot requires a surprising amount of piecing together for a trailer that’s 90 percent didactic narration – Tammy is dating this handsome, free-spirited idiot played by Paul Walker, who’s so inept that when she gives him a rose he thinks it’s food. But he’s romantic and innocent and doomed, like some combination of Forrest Gump and the Noble Savage, and Tammy falls hard for him. Enter Tammy’s jealous ex, who kidnaps Paul Walker and literally throws him to the lions at a wild animal park, where he’s found barely clinging to life and taken to a mad scientist who has built a robotic T-Rex that just needs a human brain to make it a cyborg. The scientist puts Paul Walker’s brain inside a robotic T-Rex, setting up a climactic battle for control between Tammy, the girl who loves the boy that the T-Rex was, and the mad scientist who created the cyborg party animal that he has become.
I would give almost everything I own to have been in a room with the guy who explained that idea to another guy who then wrote the first guy a check.
-Thanks to Michael at 5SF for the tip.
[apparently BadassDigest covered this the other day too]