Twenty-five years ago, director Stewart Raffill was presented with the opportunity of very quickly building a feature film around an animatronic T-Rex that he had access to. The result was a goofball horror comedy called TAMMY AND THE T-REX.
Starring Denise Richards, Paul Walker, Terry Kiser, George "Buck" Flower, and John F. Goff, the film told the following story:
Tammy is a popular high school cheerleader whose new boyfriend, Michael, might be the love of her life. But Tammy's jealous ex, Billy, won't stand for anyone coming between him and 'his' girl, so he and his friends kidnap Michael, leaving him to be mauled by a lion in a local wildlife reserve. Comatose and at death's door, Michael's body is stolen from the hospital by mad scientist Dr. Wachenstein, who extracts his brain and implants it into a giant robotic T-Rex. Horrified by his predicament and new dinosaur body, he escapes from the doctor's lab and begins brutally killing his former bullies. Meanwhile Tammy and her best friend Byron start searching for a suitable human corpse in which to re-transplant Michael's brain…
The problem was, when TAMMY AND THE T-REX was released back in 1994 it was heavily censored and cut down to receive a PG-13 rating. The distributor wanted something along the lines of a Disney movie, while Raffill had made a movie that was packed with "gross-out gags and gratuitous decapitations, gut-rippings, and head-smashings, courtesy of special effects wizard John Carl Buechler." Thankfully, Vinegar Syndrome will be releasing the R-rated cut of TAMMY AND THE T-REX into the world next month in a Blu-ray / DVD combo pack that features the following extras:
1. Region Free Blu-ray/DVD Combo
2. Newly scanned & restored in 4k from its 35mm original camera negative
3. Audio commentary with director Stewart Raffill and producer Diane Kirman
4. "Blood, Brains and a Teenage T-Rex" – an interview with director Stewart Raffill
5. "A Blast from the Past" – an interview with actress Denise Richards
6. "Having the Guts" – an interview with actor Sean Whalen
7. "A Testicular Stand-Off" – an interview with actor George Pilgrim
8. Full length PG-13 cut of Tammy and the T-Rex (sourced from video)
9. Reversible cover artwork
10. English SDH subtitles
That Blu-ray/DVD release can be pre-order at THIS LINK… but if you'd like to watch this R-rated cut before committing to owning it on disc, we have some very good news: on January 13th, fifteen days before the street date on the Blu-ray/DVD, the R-rated version of TAMMY AND THE T-REX will be making its streaming premiere on Shudder!
Some countries have had the "gore cut" of TAMMY AND THE T-REX all along, but twenty-five years after its initial release it will finally be officially available in the U.S. and Canada, and we only have one more month to wait for it.