The Gauntlet is Thrown!

In the comments below, ZeroMusic issues a challenge! His demand is simple: review more movies without actually watching them!

That's fair enough. And it's the perfect intro to my review for the movie Tamara.

Although I've never watched Tamara, I've seen the box for it often on the shelves at Blockbuster. Of course, that was some time ago. By now, poor Tamara has gone where we all knew she was destined to go: the Bargain Bin of the Pre-Viewed movie section. And though I have not seen Tamara's sultry face in a while, I think of her sometimes, and I wonder who it was that eventually bought her.

Was it the White Trash Loser Guy? Whenever I see a movie cover like Tamara's I usually associate it with some dude in a wife-beater t-shirt, boxer-shorts-above-the-waist-baggy jeans, and a patchy moustache. He's the kind of guy you often see riding a moped because he lost his license for a year with his last DUI. And his DVD collection consists almost entirely of R rated movies featuring hot, weapon-wielding chicks.

But, then again, maybe it was Chubby Goth Girl who got you, Tamara. With her multiple piercings, her black cutoff cargo pants and her black Airwalk sneakers, Chubby Goth Girl would have been unable to resist your DVD cover and its promise of dark, pseudo-feminist high school revenge fantasy.

I suppose I'll never know who ended up owning you, Tamara. All I know is that it will never be me. And that is a tragedy since Tamara is clearly high-quality movie making of the first order.

This is evident from the slug-line alone: "Revenge Has a Killer Body." When it comes to first-class movies, you can always separate the sheep from the goats simply by observing the quality of the slug-line.

For example, the slug-line for Schindler's List ("Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire") had syntax that was too convoluted entire, while the slug-line for Saving Private Ryan ("In the Last Great Invasion of the Last Great War, The Greatest Danger for Eight Men was Saving... One") was just damn wordy. Pure crap!

Tamara's slug-line, by contrast, is near perfection. "Revenge Has a Killer Body." Just so. For not only is Tamara's body "killer" in the sense that she is using her body to hold a fire axe that she clearly intends to "kill" people with, but it is also "killer" in the sense that she is really hot and wearing a sexy outfit!

You see, there are layers of meaning to this slug-line.

This slug-line obviously took hours, if not years, to construct. So if the geniuses behind Tamara spent this kind of time, effort and inspiration on the slug-line alone, you can only imagine the resources they expended on the movie itself!

And what of the movie itself? Well, according to IMDb, this movie is about how the eponymous Tamara, "an unattractive girl, who is picked on by her peers returns after her death as a sexy seductress to exact revenge."

This movie premise has the two essential ingredients for a classic:

FIRST, the ugly-pretty girl. It's been far too long since I've seen a movie where everyone pretends that a pretty girl is ugly until she takes off her glasses or does something with her hair.

SECOND, the living dead girl. This movie absolutely has to include a scene in which one of Tamara's enemies stabs her with something that, according to every law of biology, ought to be fatal. Then, to her enemy's growing horror, Tamara rises, extracts the stabbing weapon painlessly from her flesh, and states the following line: "You can't kill me. I'm already dead!"

The second one is utterly non-negotiable for me. If it turns out that Tamara never once says the line, "You can't kill me. I'm already dead" in this movie, I completely and without reservation withdraw every good thing I have said about it in this review and assign it a score of zero.

But as for now, I will operate under the well-founded assumption that Tamara does in fact tell a character in this movie that they can't kill her because she's already dead, and I recommend this movie wholeheartedly. Order your copy today! If it's still available in the Bargain Bin of your local Blockbuster's Pre-Viewed movie section!

RATING: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars