He had access to a life-sized animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex for two weeks before it had to be shipped off to a theme park in Texas. So he made a movie. As one does.

Director Stewart Raffill reverse-engineered a story to justify the short time he had with the puppet:

A high-school jock, played by a pre-fame Paul Walker, is left for dead, has his living brain transplanted into a robot dinosaur by a mad scientist, and goes on a gory revenge rampage. It ends with girlfriend Tammy, a pre-fame Denise Richards, performing a strip tease for a brain in a bowl.

Raffill shot TAMMY AND THE T-REX (1994) as an over-the-top R-rated splatter comedy. Then the money man saw it and was appalled. In Raffill's words: "He said, 'No, I wanted a Disney movie!'"

Every gore scene was hacked out. The bloodless, disjointed PG-13 version that hit video in 1994 is the one the cult developed around.

In 2017, Vinegar Syndrome located the only surviving uncut 35mm print inside the collections of the Academy Film Archive. The label released the "gore cut" in 2019.