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“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.

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.