The Trollenberg Terror (1958)
a DogKnob presentation (b/w 86m)
Top 3 Reasons to buy The Trollenberg Terror at dogknob.com
1. You will only pay $3.99 for it there
2. It is WAY better quality than the version here
3. You can choose to download a DVD-ready MPEG-2 version
Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker of F-Troop infamy), apparently a professional smoker for the United Nations, can never seem to get a vacation in. When he drops by Switzerland's Trollenberg Institute for Contaminated Cheese Development to see his old equipment-abusing buddy Professor Crevette (and his lab assistants, all of whom are named Beaker [and his recalcitrant computer with its state-of-the-art Windows 58 OS]), he becomes swept up in a whirlwind of addled psychic doublemint twins, narcissistic brits, headless geologists, homicidal zombies, flatulent bartenders, dispeptic local politicians, saucy broads who dress like NFL referees and, thankfully, that sweet, sweet Swiss shizzle.
Oh yeah... and an angry mob of decapitating, mind-controlling, opera-mauling TENTACLED CRAWLING FRIGGIN' EYEBALLS FROM ANOTHER GALAXY FER CRYIN' OUT LOUD! who go door-to door preaching the Good News.
Poor Alan... All that and he nearly ends up joining the "Kilometer High Club" ...AGAINST HIS WILL!
Amidst the chaos, carnage and swiss cheese twinkies, no one is safe... certainly not Sarah Palin, Jackass, Strauss, Mussorgsky, your sac, ducks, rave-goers, children under 16, reality TV, Van Morrison, Björk, Family Circus, floranymphomaniacs, Garrison Keillor, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, relatives of Donald Sutherland, Willy Wonka, Rush (neither of them), Antiques Road Show, PBS pledge week, Stanley Kubrick or the San Diego Padres, to name but a few.
Yes, yes... this IS the film MST3K originally riffed on its first full-length episode many thousands of years ago; it's that moldy oldie with the alternate title (The Crawling Eye) in its opening credits. THEY had a print that looked and sounded like it had been buried under your Uncle Dad's house for 40 years. OUR print has the original title and looks and sounds WAAAYY better, factors that highlight the film's striking superiority to many 50s B-list horror films.
We also used the latest technology to colorize this golden-era Sci-Fi classic so people under 30 will watch it, then used the same technology to un-colorize it when we realized it looked so very much like one of Ted Turner's freudian dreams as to make us both very, very uncomfortable and, frankly, deeply ashamed of ourselves.
DogKnob is:
Cassidy: "...in fact, it smells exactly like a hot dog vendor, a rabbi and Bigfoot hiding in the closet!"
DX Stone: "Oh Ann... How many times have I told you? Harder is a terrible safe word!"
The admission charge, at $5.99, is a bit higher than most... but so are we. And besides, it's only $3.99 at dogknob.com
Comments
I just finished watching this iriff and I'd say it's not too bad, especially for a first outing. The audio and video quality is great and the performers have great charisma and energy. DogKnob successfully avoided the two easiest traps to fall into when it comes to riffing. These are of course too many jokes and viciousness. Their pacing and timing was spot on and it's clear a lot of love went into the project while at the same time they didn’t simply attack the movie but tried to make watching it an even more enjoyable experience. I found the movie itself very imaginative, full of potential, and surprisingly graphic for its time. Keep at it DogKnob!
Dogknob - "The Trollenberg Terror" - A very edgy and "different" riffing team here. These guys are very fun to listen to because they pull out the most weirdest, random WTF riffs you'll hear. And they come out of nowhere sometimes...a little mumble, a blurt where u weren't expecting a joke to get inserted coupled with ad lib ramblings that start to make sense after a point. A very talented team. This is money well spent - recommended!!
for being as much work as it is...
We got a message from someone who waited in line all weekend to buy our iRiff that there was a problem with the video. We downloaded RiffTrax's copy and it did not look nearly as good as our original. We have at this point replaced the file and it now looks fabulous... and it still has the trademark audio everyone expects from a DogKnob production. If you already have it, you can now get a much better one and if you don't have it yet... YOU LIE!!!
Great job DogKnob!! Where can you find so much entertainment and happiness for only $6? I'm going to enjoy this one over and over and over again! (Especially until you produce more great riffs for me to enjoy!)
I can't believe I forgot to review this!
First, I love that DogKnob is doing VOD riffs because it makes it easier to view them as they are already synced. Second, I think it's so awesome that DogKnob replaced the squiggly first version of the riff with a better, less squiggly version. The audio and picture were great and I thank DogKnob for revising the file so we could have great picture quality.
As for the riff, it was hysterical. The movie was absolutely dreadful and DogKnob (man, I really like saying Dogknob. DogKnob.) did a great job riffing it without breaking down into wharrgarbl. It was most definitely a quality first effort and I look forward to more from DogKnob.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. That glitch was a bummer, but I'm glad it was easy to fix. We have a few new things going now: A collaboration I'm not at liberty to discuss and something truly gruesome hopefully in time for Halloween.
So first things first: this print and the audio on both the riff and the original film are both SO CRISP AND BEAUTIFUL it made me realize that the crappy B-rate drek we've all known for years as "The Crawling Eye" is actually a pretty damn good film! It suffers from a few pacing flaws, and some just ridiculous acting at times, though, and therefore works well for a riff, but still, I was impressed at the atmosphere it managed to create and the fact that we're (like in Night of the Living Dead) only ever given a vague, "maybe" explanation of the bizarre events going on. But we're not here to talk about that, are we, Judy? (We're not gonna talk about Judy at all!)
DogKnob does something possibly completely original in their riff and creates not just a "reactionary" riff like most of us do, but in fact pretty much creates a second, "alternative" track to the film. This isn't so much a riff as a secondary audio track. It's not that they're talking over the characters' dialogue (though they will sometimes, of course), but they're often building off running gags and/or setups that bear little or no relation to ANYTHING seen on screen. We'll all do this in small amounts, of course, building off little more than a look or a slight resemblance to some obscure '70s screen icon, but DogKnob does it in what might be called a ferocious manner. For instance, there's the one guy who's randomly given like a dozen 'Just like your sister, eh?' innuendos for no discernible reason I could see. Not that it's not funny, but it really only FITS as a response to ONE of his (much later) lines. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy duddy, but I much preferred the latter half of the film, where they mixed these strange alterna-lines with a greater degree of traditional riffs. By far my favorite part of the entire presentation, however, was the post-credits music mash-up. If these guys aren't editors in real life, we live in a sad, sad world. A strange kind of effect is that sometimes the "riffs" are coming so fast and furious, and DX and Cassidy sound so similar (at least to me) that at times it sounds like you're trying to watch a film in a theater and somewhere behind you, there's a man very loudly and quickly descending into the depths of madness. Which is AWESOME.
In short, DogKnob descends upon the riffing community like a pack of starving insane feral dogs and tears a chunk out of your expectancies, creating something unexpected and intriguing. Screw funny (though it is that), this is after your sleep glands. Strike another victory bow for dadaist humor.
I watched the first 30 minutes or so of the original MST version last night just out of curiosity. The one odd thing is that both groups decided that the mountain was stalking Ann. DogKnob gave it a bit "sexier" stalking voice, but basically the same gag. Struck me as really strange since that gag would NEVER occur to me, I don't think.
Not what you'd expect, but damn good. My only real complaint was the overabundance of, in my opinion, unmotivated toilet humor. Sometimes it worked (the like 80 ways for the like third to-the-cabin mission guy to say "I must use the restroom" was pretty amusing), but overall it just seemed a bit puerile. Also I think the riff takes a while to "warm up," if you will, but I liked the movie enough that I didn't mind.
Looking forward to their next project.
Michael T Bradley
Ice on Mars
Wow. I don't know what to say for that... except THANKS!
We were lucky enough to find a very good copy of the film somewhere and we watched the first 20 minutes or so up until the part where the bartender says "Excuse me," at which point one of us said "What if he farts right before he says that?" So our whole decision to make this our first project was based on a fart joke.
From there we just slipped into creating these alter-egos for each of the characters instead of doing a "conventional" riff, which they would occasionally do on MST to a limited extent. Those were my favorites of theirs. Every joke relates to something happening onscreen: dialog, costume, body-language, etc. There's nothing random about it at all. The thing about this riff is that you actually have to watch it like you would watch a "normal" film because the characters' alter-egos develop right along with the characters themselves and if you're not paying attention, a barrage of jokes will sail over your head.
For the parts of the film with long stretches of no dialogue, we would either slip into conventional riffing or we would create a "musical" interlude, sort of an extension of Joel and the Bots breaking into song-meets Pink Floyd. We have all these audio effects/doo-dads to do this, so why not use them?
We watched the whole thing yesterday because I made an MPEG-2 version like you get from MKB (we are going to make this available to people who buy the riff so they can make their own DVD). I was thinking that someone used to MST3K-style riffing seeing this for the first time might be like "WTF?," but WTF: It's what we do. Given the limited choices available in the Public Domain, the whole experience including the graphics and the music video is not something we will be able to do very often, so we wanted to use the opportunity to do something really special for everyone.
This was a GREAT iRiff guys..... highly recommended. The riffing was funny and full of energy. I like the fact that you picked a public domain movie and released it as a VOD. These kind of movies usually are not riffed anymore and it is very enjoyable to download the movie and riff in one package. I downloaded, converted it to MP4 (very easy) watched on my main TV via AppleTv and if one wanted, you could conver the MP4 to MPEG-2 and burn on a regular DVD.
The movie itself, despite the low budget, was kind of enjoyable. Like a low budget X-Files episode.