Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Brilliant and touching

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Concert promoter and his partner believe the rock scene is kaput--but while driving through the mountain town of Alpine Peaks, they happen upon a crowded hall where all the dancers (young and old) are sandpapering the bottoms of their shoes...turns out it's in preparation for a local dance called the Twist. Once the promoter gets a load of those gyrating hips and slippery feet, he sees dollar signs; the next step is to head for New York City to spread the word on this craze, but unleashing a new dance on an unsuspecting public is met with some skepticism. Cheap, stilted attempt at tracing the Twist's origins, with corny dialogue and amateurish performances. Producer Sam Katzman lifted the plot (and much of the dialogue) from his 1956 hit "Rock Around the Clock", which was followed in 1957 by "Don't Knock the Rock"; this movie had a sequel of its own, "Don't Knock the Twist" in 1962. Why Katzman felt rock and roll was fading out and needed this boost is unclear, unless it was just a pretext for getting the plot in motion. Either way, it's a pretty lousy affair, even with performances by Chubby Checker and Dion. *1/2 from ****

***SPOILERS*** It's 1960 with the King Elvis Presley drafted into the US Army with Rock & Roll music now on life support talent scout Mitch Mason played by a very youthful looking John Cronin who according to the IMDb Bio. of him is supposed to have been born in 1904, making him 55 years old at the time the movie was made, and his friend and fellow talent scout Dizzy Bellew, Alvy Moore, travel to his hick town in New England named Alpine Peaks to checkout this new dance craze called "The Twist" thats the talk of the town. With Clay Cole doing the both singing and twisting on stage the two are amazed in that everyone in town young old and even those blue noeses who can't stand hip & jive music are into it! That in them throwing away all their inhibitions and just twisting the night, that's Saturday night, away! Knowing that he's got a gold mine in the "Twist" becoming the biggest music craze to hit the USA since Rudy Valley Mitch tries to get top music promoter Joe Marshall,Tol Avery, to promote it and it's singer Clay Cole and the two dancers who preform it Tina & Larry Louden, Mary Mitchell & Jeff Parker. But poor Mitch faces an uphill struggle in having Marsall agree with him. He has to marry Marshall spoiled rotten to the core daughter Debbie, Maura McGiverey, before he gives him the O.K!An almost carbon copy of the 1956 Rock & Roll hit movie "Rock Around the Clock" made five years earlier with the same corny and cheesy ending with Mitch ending up legally stiffing Joe Marshall in his so-called iron clad contract and even like in the movie "Rock Around the Clock" slipping in the them song from the movie "From Here to Eternity" for good measures. Still it's worth watching with the great songs in it preformed by Chubby Checker Dion, Dion Dimucci, "The Marcels" as well as pretty teenage singing sanitation Vicki Spencer that will make you forget just how silly the movie really is.What you really get to see in the movie "Twist Around the Clock" is just what a great and generous person the great Chubby Checker really is. Even though it was Chubby who made the Twist the most popular dance craze of the 1960's he didn't mind disk jockey and later talk show host Clay Cole taking credit for it in the film! Something you'd never see with the dog eat dog competition and egos among those in the popular music business today.

A rehash of a fairly plot-less "Rock Around The Clock" (1956), "Twist Around The Clock" functions only as a ninety-minute advertisement for the then-popular song "The Twist" and all products related to same, including the career of singer Chubby Checker.Musical staging is cheap-looking, tacky, and lacks imagination. The dreadful dialogue lacks subtlety and subtext, and even includes the 1950s teenage word "daddy-o". Characters are all stereotyped. Acting is borderline amateurish. Sloppy direction reeks of early 1960s sitcoms. B&W photography is acceptable but conventional. The worst musical number is something called "Merry Twistmas"; get it?Lip-synching of lyrics is obvious, and conveys the impression that singers practiced all of five minutes. The entire production comes across as opportunistic, quickly done, and phony.The one thing I did like was Dion's legit performance midway through of his musical hit "Runaround Sue", a credible rock-n'-roll song.My impression is that the producers simply copied the script of "Rock Around The Clock", adding "The Twist" as the main change. After all, in the intervening five years, no one would ever know this film is just a rip-off of an earlier musical advertisement. For modern viewers, "Twist Around The Clock" serves as a cultural time capsule back to the age of dinosaurs ... daddy-o.

I really enjoyed TWIST AROUND THE CLOCK as a genuinely snazzy low budget 1961 dance pic with a roster of (still) very well known songs. Other comments will tell you how identical it is to ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK (it certainly is) but for me that did not diminish any of the delight. I am quite fascinated by Vicki Spencer who I see only made one other film TEENAGE MILLIONAIRE. What happened to her? In TWIST she is almost everything Ann-Margret is a year later in BYE BYE BIRDIE... even in her gorgeous looks. Dion I had never seen but knew the songs well (The Wanderer, Runaround Sue) ... he is certainly the iconic 60s nightclub star in the Bobby Darin style. I found the script hilarious. It is actually funny with some great sly comments... especially between the father and daughter nemeses... Chubby Checker is his dynamite fun self... I also thought he was very handsome in this film, given I guess he was in his mid 20s, something I had never observed... perhaps that is because I am used to seeing later years material when he looks good, but here, younger he is certainly compelling. TWIST is enormous musical fun and for kids to enjoy because they could actually dance along with it. My DVD is a Canadian reprint with new titles over the original Katzman/Columbia 35mm release... the body of the film is the same as the original film. I had such a good time watching this film... I really laughed with it and thought the songs terrific... and then there is the dance team fun.... and The incredible Marcels to top it off.