I once went under Sue at the field museum in Chicago for her birthday because there was going to be free cake but when I got there, I saw that all these little kids were putting their hands and heads and faces into the cake and I was like no thanks.
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.
Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.
“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked.
“Yeah, probably.”
