Tamara (2005)

[Bartwald]

TAMARA (2005)

DIRECTOR: Jeremy Haft
CAST: Jenna Dewan, Katie Stuart, Chad Faust, Bryan Clark, Melissa Elias, Matthew Marsden

RATING: 4/10


When Jeffrey Reddick wrote the script for Final Destination not many people seemed to notice that the main attraction of this film – the guessing game of who is going to die next and in what manner – was snatched from Richard Donner's The Omen. One can suspect that Reddick, encouraged by the Final Destination experience, thought "What would happen if I'd snatch some pieces from Carrie for a change?" He did just that and this is how Tamara came into being.

However, if Final Destination was a fresh and thrilling film that reuses a single old trick, Tamara is just an unconvincing copy of the plot used in Stephen King's book and Brian De Palma's film; a copy, let me add, that brings nothing new to what we already know. The new Carrie is, obviously, Tamara – a teenage girl who wears unfashionable dresses, is interested in magic (with no great success, though), has no friends whatsoever and is in love with a young, married teacher. And perhaps to the very end of her days would Tamara remain an outcast if it weren't for finding out that her worst school enemies – the boys who belong to the football team – have been using steroids and can end up in lots of trouble in case this fact is exposed. No surprise then that Tamara does her best to reveal the scandal and the team of now very angry football players soon plans a revenge. Tamara is lured by them to a hotel room where she expects to have a romantic date with her favourite teacher but instead she meets there her schoolmates with a video camera: it turns out they have been recording her embarassing preparations for the date, complete with undressing to her underwear. The teenager panics, tries to grab the camera, a chaotic fight ensues and... she dies, hitting her head on the edge of the table. Now the vengeance team panics. What should they do to hide this accidental death? Why – just get the shovels, dig a hole in some forgotten spot nearby, put the body there and the problem's solved. They do just that. To their huge surprise, the next day Tamara turns up at school – alive, deadly sexy in her mini-skirt, and with some shiny, expensive hair-do. And on top of all this, she is also self-confident, cheeky and finally understands how to successfully use magic. The new Tamara does what the old Tamara always dreamt of: she makes the handsome teacher love her and prepares a cruel fate for the football players and their girlfriends. We the viewers, on the other hand, get to wonder if this main character really is a person to root for; sure, she's got more than one reason to want the revenge on her schoolmates but isn't what she's doing a little bit too much? Did those boys deserve dying these cruel deaths? Did the teacher's wife deserve going crazy over the husband's affair with a sexy student?

Comparing Tamara with Carrie shows how empty this new movie is. The most striking differences? First of all, even though Tamara does sport several good scenes (usually connected with Tamara's enemies getting killed), at no particular point does it get as thrilling as Carrie did during its highlights. Secondly, Jenna Dewan who plays Tamara cannot even dream of matching the multi-layered performance of Sissy Spacek. Dewan may have managed to get some praise from the critics for the role, too, but it's impossible to say her character is believable, especially at the beginning of the film where the makers are trying to convince us that she's unattractive, while we can clearly see that the second she washes the hair and wears a normal dress she'll be unbearably sexy (Sissy Spacek actually could BE terribly ugly in one scene and then drop dead gorgeous in another). Finally, De Palma's film was based on a poignant problem (an outcast girl is cruelly humiliated which activates her deadly paranormal abilities) and was therefore highly emotional; in Tamara the main plot idea seems totally artificial (an outcast girl gets accidentally killed by her peers and returns from the grave as an insensitive egoist with a taste for murder) and it fails to strike any true emotions, only leaving us to witness the enjoyable f/x show-off and hypnotizing us with the mini-skirts worn by Jenna Dewan.

Tamara is neither a horror film that cleverly uses well-worn genre antics (like Wes Craven's Scream did a decade ago) or a hardly visible "borrowing" of a successful plot device that weaves many new ideas around it (like James Wong's Final Destination). This is just a professionally prepared round trip to once again show us some already well-known horror themes. Shouldn't bore you too much but won't stick in your memory for too long, either.

[slayrrr666]

Even though I know it's bad, I still want to see this. Something tells me it's just cheesy enough for me to enjoy it. Came damn close to winning a copy online, so I'll have to keep looking.

Great review as always, Bart.

[Bartwald]

Thanks for kind words, slayrrr. I think you're going to like Tamara much more than I did - after all, it is quite well-paced, some effects are very good and at points it is... brutal. Me, I was just a bit too focused on how they are reusing plot of one of my all time favourite. Technically, though, I must admit it's much above average.

Tell us what you think when you see this.

[slayrrr666]

Will do.

[slayrrr666]

Found out this is on TV next month, so I'll be able to see it for free.

[slayrrr666]

“Tamara” is a heavily cliched but strangely enjoyable experience.

**SPOILERS**

An outcast at her high school, Tamara Riley, (Jenna Dewan) is chastised by athletes Sean, (Bryan Clark) and Patrick, (Gil Hacohen) for a damaging newspaper article. After a revenge prank designed to humiliate her goes horribly wrong and she is accidentally killed, the group, including Roger, (Marc Devigne) Jesse, (Chad Faust) Kisha, (Melissa Elias) and Chloe, (Katie Stuart) decides to bury her in the woods nearby. When she returns to school, they suspect foul play until they start to die off one-by-one. When it becomes apparent that Tamara was a student of witchcraft and had used it to resurrect herself from the dead and is enacting revenge on the group, they race to stop her before it’s all completed.

The Good News: This wasn’t all that bad actually. One of the film’s greatest strengths is that the opening set-up is realized with a great set-up. It really and accurately hounds home the type of humiliation that would be necessary for the revenge to be pulled off like a necessity rather than a plot contrivance. There is a compounding series of events that transpire to make us believe that a bloody revenge is going to happy, and the remarkable thing is that none of them are really all that difficult to watch or sit through. It’s all perfectly keeping with a nice pace, which the film then continues throughout as well. There really isn’t a lag at all in the film, and it constantly makes the on-screen action all the more watchable. The revenge portion of the film is easily the best part, as wondering what will happen next allowing for some great scenes and a minor bit of suspense. The initial act of revenge is the film’s clear highlight, being incredibly gory and brutal and a real showstopper of a scene that’s pulled off for all the pain and torture it possibly can. It’s made all the better with the creepy build-up, where through a series of incredibly graphic hallucinations, they are subjected to a series of tortures that are well-realized and pulled off convincingly. A scene where a victim is forced to ingest beer bottles is really squirmy and puts a little more gore into the film, which really should’ve been higher considering what happened in the film. There’s an impaling on a wooden stick, a screwdriver in the neck, an x-acto knife in the eye, and having nails chewed off to reveal the bones underneath. It’s brutal in that sense, but really needed more gore to emphasize this aspect more. There are a couple of good suspenseful stalking scenes included as well, just for diversity. All in all, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.

The Bad News: For as much as the film had some great ideas, there are still plenty of things wrong here. One of the biggest issues here is the complete and utter shamelessness in borrowing from other films for itself. There is a large amount of borrowed stuff here, with the overall plot outline being the major and most identifiable culprit. To borrow such a plot-line and not even alter it in the slightest from what is really the blue-print for these types of films is really hard to get past, and it’s not so much in that it uses it, but in that there’s really nothing that stands out to let it become something unintentional. It feels all the time like it was a conscious decision to borrow the plot-line in that manner, and it simply adds to the borrowed feel to the film. The heroine is straight from the teen-romance category, where a singular clothing transformation changes the main star. The main star’s affiliation with witchcraft has been used in countless films, and is really a cliche in itself. The biggest is the romance of the high school English Teacher, which is borrowed from a complete series of films on the subject. All these lead to the feeling of it being a culmination of different films coming together. One of the other big problems is that there is a lot of tease in here and very rarely does it deliver. The gore is acceptable but a little short considering how horrific they really were. There’s no nudity from anyone, despite how much time is spent focusing on the subject. The killer uses the victims themselves to kill each other, and rarely does it by themself. There’s even a scene where one of the other characters is responsible for deaths rather than the killer, and it really takes away the fear and dread that is supposedly built up for the killer. There’s a couple other small, minuscule problems but they aren’t that damaging to the film.

The Final Verdict: Heavily cliched to a fault for some, this is still a very fun and entertaining film that really tries and delivers some good parts every now and then. If you can look past the negatives, which isn’t that hard at all, and simply sit back and enjoy it, then this isn’t all that bad of a film and should be worthy of a look.

Rated R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence

[Bartwald]

Ha, ha - told you you were going to like this one! Good, I can understand why.

[slayrrr666]

Yeah, I liked it more than I thought I would, but it's still no masterpiece. I felt I couldn't just dismiss it outright because it borrowed from a large number of films, just that I can harp on it for that reason.