Dirty Pillows For All

 

I will always give a good deal of grace to a movie whose opening credits use the Buffy font.

Let's go.

Quick Plot: Tamara is a misfit high school student with a deep crush on her English teacher and an inability to cleanly tie her hair back in an appealing early aughts style. When her article about steroids hits the front page of the school paper, she becomes an even bigger target of the cool kids.

A few jocks decide to play a sadistic prank on the poor girl: luring her to a hotel room under the guise of a date with her sweet English teacher crush, only to film her nakedly crying when she discovers the ruse. As is often the case in these kinds of movies, things turn violent and hospitality furniture proves to have deadly sharp corners. Tamara is killed in a chaotic fight, and her drunken pers decide the only way forward is to bury her and move on.

Kind Chloe is reluctant and voices her reservations, but it's not enough to overpower the gang (especially as most of them are likely taking regular doses of HGH). 

What the kids don't know is that Tamara had been flirting with dark magic. She was just about to finish a love binding spell but couldn't bring herself to spill her own blood. Thankfully that hotel desk took care of it, and she's back with bouncier hair, bouncier breasts, and an ability to control the bodies of whoever she touches to do terrible things to themselves. 

Yes, it's essentially another Carrie, but so what? Directed by Jeremy Haft from a script by Final Destination godfather Jeffrey Reddick, Tamara is shockingly fun and far smarter than its cover art suggests. Jenna Dewan works well as the title character, even if her first act mouse calls to mind the horrors of a ponytailed She's All That. 

As someone who would use one of her genie bottle wishes for an adaptation that gives us a fat Carrie as the novel intended, I am used to this. 

Size 2 aside, Tamara is fun! When the violence kicks in, it's creatively wild in very surprising ways. We also understand Tamara's trauma (alcoholic leering dad, cruel classmates) well enough to make her specific choices fully understandable, straight down to forcing two alpha male bullies to hook up. 

There's a part of me that wishes Tamara went deeper into its dissection of high school psychology. One fellow geek gets some rough treatment early on when Tamara uses his past suicide attempts to show off her new powers, and her female bully harbors her own body dysmorphia. There are heavier depths to the story, but Tamara's ultimate style moves a bit more to camp than substance. 

That's okay! Considering what else we were getting in this very rough era of teen-centered horror, I'll take it. 

High Points

High school movie girls are often cruel beyond reason, but one of Tamara's strengths is that it makes its female characters surprisingly human. Sure, villain Keisha is cruel, but she's also bulimic (which makes for a pretty creative act of violence) and clearly suffering, while Chloe serves the Sue Snell role of having and acting on a real conscience 

Low Points

Okay fine: Jenna Dewan is still too conventionally beautiful to fully be a believable pariah

Lessons Learned

Bewitched male minions are shockingly easy to kill

An English teacher's arsenal is literary quotes

Just because you're a social outcast with flat hair doesn't mean you can't rock a clean manicure

Rent/Bury/Buy

I was pleasantly surprised by Tamara. It's not a forgotten classic or glistening lost gem, but for a 2006 barely-known genre film, I found it packed some creative visuals, reasonable character work, and an overall satisfying 90 minute watch. See if you agree! It's streaming now on Amazon Prime (and probably Tubi; this feels very much like it would be streaming on Tubi).