1h 19min | Musical | 31 December 1961 | b/w, fs
Director: Greg Garrison
Stars: Joey Dee, The Starliters, Jo Ann Campbell, Kay Armen, Zohra Lampert.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054971/
Watched online, poor print.
8 songs in the Soundtracks.
2nd of 3 films for KA, who sings Let's Twist (not sure if that's different than Hey, Let's Twist; both are listed in the ST). I think she sings another, non-rock tune, but it's not in the ST. Her prior film was Hit the Deck ('55).
Finally! An enjoyable rock movie. Since it centers on 1 act, I won't call it rocksploitation. But feels like a poverty row release, with bad acting and other sub-par values. However, the print is blurry and overly dark, so this might have looked better as filmed.
What makes it fun: pretty darned good rock music, the added singing of KA, and a mostly coherent story about the family (2 brothers & a father; KA is a friend of the father). The Peppermint Twist is familiar, and that (or another) song has very good saxophone work.
IMDb trivia on Joey Dee's page: "With his group, Joey Dee and The Starliters, helped launch the "Twist" craze in 1961 with their hit song "The Peppermint Twist". They were signed to a short gig at a New York City nightclub, The Peppermint Lounge, but their song and their act clicked and began to draw the celebrity crowd, with politicians, movie and TV stars and "high society" types regularly attending, and the group's "short" gig turned into a 13-month engagement."
Clearly the film (Teenage Millionaire, 8'61) with Chubby Checker's Let's Twist Again came out earlier, but I'm not going to try tracking down the history of where the Twist craze really started.
I found the 12" vinyl OST from Paramount on eBay for a reasonable price. Too bad they don't seem to have converted it to CD, although many of the songs are on CD for Joey Dee & The Starliters.
The + on my rating might be too generous, a result of my finding one of these films that actually had some pleasure to it.
distr. Paramount, dir. Garrison; 6+
