Tamara (2006)

[GL]

“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