Trepanator (1992)

With little to no anticipation or expectations, I press play and Trepanator begins. The opening titles shakily appear on the screen. Underneath “starring” I see “Jean Rollin”. I scoff. What a cheap way to sucker someone into buying your film – you know, by pretending that Jean Rollin is in it. Then another name catches my attention: William Lustig in a guest appearance. My, admittedly slow working, brain-cogs start turning. Surely N. G. Mount, famed director of Ogroff the Mad Mutilator (1983), couldn’t stoop as low as blatant fake-name dropping. And when Jean Rollin indeed appears on screen, my jaw hits the fucking ground. My jaw stayed firmly glued to the floor, save for screams of laughter, as Trepanator ripped through 78 amazing minutes.

 

TREPANATOR
France, 1992, N. G. Mount

A mad moustachioed scientist fires an arrow into a grunting caged man’s face and katana-chops disembodied heads pulling out their rotten brains. This intercuts with a group of deadpan men driving a car and looking at a map. Said men turn out to be cops on their way to arrest said mad scientist. After five minutes featuring several shots of piles of skeletons and bald fake heads, the cops arrive and, upon witnessing a large amount of severed hands fall out of a drain pipe, shoot and kill the mad scientist, interrupting some sort of absurd trepanation experiment. Within this sequence, N. G. Mount introduces the scientist’s son who is playing with a skeletal head. The French cops take the child into their care and we discover that this amazing opening ten minutes was simply a prologue and only a tiny taste of the lunacy to come. Cut to years later, we’re in New York (only everyone continues to speak French and we’re clearly not in New York), Dr. Herbert East (Michel Finas) – get it, Re-Animator fans? Herbert East! Eh? Eh?! Clever, eh? EH? – the now grownup orphaned child of the original mad scientist is working for his uncle, Dr. Roll (Jean Rollin – get it?! EH?!), in a very dodgy hospital where he seems to murder the bulk of his patients. Dr. East is in the brain-selling biz; mashing brains together, swapping people’s brains, bringing the dead back to life and playing with undead cats in his spare time. East is about to come into the big bucks when a future presidential candidate enlists his help. Only it’s never that simple, is it?

I can’t stress to you how amazing Trepanator is. I know I get really excited really easily about shitty movies, but this is special. I honestly can’t believe that this hasn’t been put on a bad movie pedestal with hordes of adoring fans bowing to it. Trepanator is clearly in the hands of a deranged idiot, and I mean that in the kindest and best possibly way. I tried to write a list of the mad happenings in this film and had to stop. Literally every second of screen time is filled with the wildest stupidity I’ve experienced in some time. As to be expected, we given the standard bad movie goodness: horrible nonsensical editing that somehow lingers on the worst looking shots, hysterically fake news desk sets, shots cobbled together from different times and locations (there’s a scene at a football field cut with a “stadium audience” that has to be seen to be believed) and generally poor acting, effects, music and plotting. But Trepanator goes above and beyond giving fit-inducing brilliance like an actor breaking another character’s neck and very, very obviously making the sound of the breaking neck using his mouth, repetitive sound effects cut in at random points (there’s an obnoxious sound effect of a buzzing fly that comes back over and over again), audio that completely changes shot to shot making the film unbelievably jarring, a scene of a corpse with a boner which a character casually points out and the most unabashedly unscientific science ever seen in cinema history.

There are some moments that I honestly couldn’t even begin to explain; moments so ludicrous that I had trouble processing what I was seeing and had to rewind over and over. Instead of attempting an explanation, here you bloody go:

And then there’s the cast. Wow. The French language, at first, gives the film a misleading hint of class; the language barrier masking performers’ horrible delivery. But nothing could hide the disgrace that is Jean Rollin’s acting abilities. Before you tear me to shreds for insulting the Moviemaking God that is Rollin, let me explain myself: I love Jean Rollin. He’s one of my favourite directors, and I was shattered when he passed back in 2010. His cameos in his own films, while not fantastic, are passable. In Trepanator however, Rollin presents a performance that would make Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman shiver. Partly, this is the fault of the film’s pathetic editing, which has a tendency to leave shots of Rollin’s mugging hanging, and obviously Rollin didn’t have the best material to work with. But by Christ Almighty, Rollin’s faux-shocked reaction shots, of which there are many, are incredible. One in particular, which involved a hand covering his shocked expression (still below), had me in tears of laughter. The cameo from Lustig is equally heinous, painfully making blunt references to Maniac Cop. To be fair, he really looks ashamed throughout his brief appearance. Lustig is murdered off-screen by Jean Rollin. I think. It’s really hard to tell what’s going on in that scene. The rest of the cast are wonderfully bad. Michel Finas, in particular, shines like a stinking turd in the smug leading role.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this amazing piece of shit. A mess of a film that speeds along at a breakneck pace full of ridiculous gore and dodgy Re-Animator winks, Trepanator is truly among the best of the best-worst. The inclusion of Jean Rollin and Bill Lustig give the film an additional edge and will leave you wondering what on earth these two great men were thinking when they signed up for this. N. G. Mount, I thank you from the bottom of my cold dead heart for this brilliant, brilliant, brilliant and stupid, stupid, stupid masterpiece. SEE THIS NOW!