The Movie Where Paul Walker’s Brain Gets Put in a Dinosaur Is a Must Watch

After anchoring late 1990s teen movies like Varsity Blues and Meet the Deedles, Paul Walker’s career really took off with his first portrayal of Brian O’Conner in The Fast and the Furious. After that, Walker also garnered further fans through his leading roles in titles like Eight Below and Flags of Our Fathers, not to mention the increasingly high-profile nature of subsequent Fast & Furious sequels like Fast Five. With these titles, Walker cultivated a sizeable fanbase that spanned a whole slew of different genres. But for many cult B-movie cinema devotees, there’s one Paul Walker title that unquestionably reigns supreme above all others.

There’s no stunt in the Fast & Furious saga as impressive as the bizarre 1994 movie Walker headlined in such an early stage of his career that he’s not even credited on the film’s theatrical poster. Tammy and the T-Rex isn’t a household name feature by any means, but for those aware of its ridiculousness, it’s downright unforgettable.

What is Tammy and the T-Rex?

High school cheerleader Tammy (Denise Richards) and boyfriend Michael (Paul Walker) are happily in love at the beginning of writer/director Stewart Raffill’s vision of Tammy and the T-Rex. However, evil forces are at work to ruin their love. For one thing, Tammy’s ex-lover Billy has a violent vendetta against Michael that ends with Billy and his cronies leaving Michael to get mauled by a lion. Then there’s the ambitions of Dr. Wachenstein (Terry Kiser), who is so proud of his robotic T-Rex that he yearns to give it a human brain so that it can achieve consciousness. These subplots converge once Michael is declared dead and his brain is translated into that T-Rex.

From there, Tammy and the T-Rex (in its original unrated form) combines heartfelt romance material, like T-Rex Michael trying to reunite with Tammy (including presenting her with flowers) and gnarly bloody material of this prehistoric creature exacting carnage on High Schoolers. It’s a slice of B-movie madness you won’t see anywhere, right down to visual details like T-Rex Michael having long sock puppet arms that allow him to do things like call people on a pay phone. Tammy and the T-Rex has nowhere near the budget or grandeur of Jurassic Park, but it uncovers inspired ways to wring memorable low-budget fun out of its limitations.

It’s also fun to watch Tammy and the T-Rex in a modern visual effects context and admire the commitment to realizing T-Rex Michael as an animatronic dinosaur. This option presents itself with limitations, hence why even in-universe this character is a mechanical dinosaur rather than actually a resurrected prehistoric entity. However, this does mean there are lots of times that the mechanical dinosaur is on-screen compared to modern B-movies keeping expensive CG beasts off-screen for as much as possible. You get a lot of mechanical dinosaur bang for your buck in watching Tammy and the T-Rex. Plus, the restrictions of filming with such a limiting prop inspire some fun images and bizarre moments throughout the Tammy and the T-Rex runtime. There’s so much more personality to this robotic beast than a thousand hollow CG creatures in modern bigger-budgeted titles.

[RELATED: The 7 Best Velociraptor Scenes in the Jurassic Park Franchise]

Tammy and the T-Rex’s Fun Never Goes Out of Style

Tammy and the T-Rex also had the benefit of being shot in 1994, with visual qualities intrinsic to movies of that era unintentionally heightening the fun of the feature. For one thing, Tammy was shot on 35mm, which lends an extra sense of innate professionalism to its images. The incongruity of precious film stock being used to realize such preposterous imagery and storytelling material is incredibly fun. Meanwhile, Tammy was shot back when it was possible for Paul Walker and Denise Richards to headline a silly B-movie. Juxtaposing a future Bond girl and Fast & Furious star with this outlandish production is a sight that must be seen to believed.

Tammy and the T-Rex has lots of charms that, initially, went unnoticed by the general public. Tammy and the T-Rex first hit American theaters and home video shelves in a stripped-down PG-13 form that didn’t garner many fans. It largely languished into obscurity afterward, only popping up afterward on internet shows like Red Letter Media’s Best of the Worst or podcasts dedicated to trashy B-movie cinema. However, a late 2010s 4K restoration of its original R-rated cut has made the feature more widely available to a whole new generation of fans as well as making Raffill’s creative vision more accessible than ever.

With Tammy and the T-Rex now available on multiple streaming services, more and more people are discovering one of Paul Walker’s earliest acting ventures. Heck, the gorier cut of Tammy and the T-Rex even has (as of this writing) a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score! If you think you’ve seen it all in terms of the movies Paul Walker headlined, think again. Even for a guy who was always engaging in ludicrous Fast & Furious adventures, Tammy and the T-Rex took Walker to excitingly preposterous creative heights.

Tammy and the T-Rex is now streaming on Peacock and Tubi.