“Revenge has a Killer Body”.  That’s the tagline for ‘Tamara’ which is one of the stupidest taglines I’ve ever read.  Revenge has a killer body.  What the hell does that mean?  A better one would have been Revenge has a drop dead body, since Tamara is like dead and all, and since her body doesn’t actually kill, it just didn’t make any sense to me.  That’s not to say that Tamara, as played by extremely fit, totally tasty, unbelievably hot Jenna Dewan  (Another twenty six year old ‘high school student’) doesn’t have a killer body, because believe me, she does.  It’s just a stupid ass tag line is all.

Anyway, we have Tamara, an unattractive (hardly) weird high school nerdish geek saddled with a drunken lecherous dad and possessing a really big crush on her underwear model English teacher (Mathew Marsden).  She also dabbles in a little dime store witchcraft as well, which as we will soon find out will serve her well.  So Tamara pisses off the cool kids in at the high school by writing an expose on roids running rampant with the schools sports team which pisses off the jocks mightily.  So to get her back, they run a little tricky game on the girl by convincing her that this English teacher of hers wants to meet for some secret love.  Okay, so in a situation that can only happen in movies, a group of people, who generally have no relation to one another,  are sitting around in hotel room because they need to exist to die later on.  A geek, a Jock, an earth girl, a surfer boy, a whore and another jock.  One of the jock’s has set up a camera in the adjoining room to film Tamara getting ready to meet Teach while the rest secretly watch in the next room.  Tamara strips down to her undies, and for Tamara to be as ‘homely’ and ‘dowdy’ as she is, my Lord does she have

some nice underwear.  Let me assure you, if I was in ‘high school’ and a group of my friends had the pleasure to witness what these guys witnessed once Tamara got to her Secrets of Victoria, the joke would have been stopped and the battle would have begun to see who would be the first to get a hold of some of that.  For real.

Regardless, the joke goes all wrong, Tamara dies, the kids are remorseful but decide to try and cover it up by burying Tamara out in a field somewhere.  Surprise, surprise.  To the shock of our rowdy ‘teens’, Tamara shows up for class the next day, looking very much like a Jay-Z video ho, ready to make everybody and anybody pay.  Remember, revenge has a killer body.

Since Tamara lacked originality, it needed to find some other way to set itself apart from the sea of teenage horror flicks and it succeeds greatly in not finding that other way.  Not that ‘Tamara’ is bad, it’s just totally run of the mill.  There’s no frights or jumps in Tamara, and very little suspense.  There wasn’t a whole lot of gore, for those who like that kind of thing, and nary a lick of gratuitous nudity, which is a shame because the actress who played the character of Kisha (Melissa Elias) would have moved numerous volumes of this thing if she had just taken off her bra.  A shame.  The ending of how they eventually had to deal with Tammy was kinda cool, though. 

‘Tamara’ was obviously shot on a low budget, but there was clearlya lot of skill involved in the production.  Scott Kevan’s cinematography was very good and this being director Jeremy Haft’s first feature, he shows a lot of promise behind the camera.  But ‘Tamara’ could have benefited by pushing the horror envelope a little bit more to set itself apart.  I’m not looking for another ‘Hostel’ here, but sadly, ‘Tamara’ was a little bit too tame for its own good.