Rock All Night (1957)

Rock All Night (1957). 1h 2m

“Like Cormanu0026#39;s u0026quot;Teenage Doll,u0026quot; u0026quot;Sorority Girlu0026quot; and several others of his AIP era, this is basically a bleak little existential melodrama masquerading as a lurid exploitation movie, with talky, unpleasant human relationships in a couple cheap interior settings poorly disguising the lack of action and u0026quot;fun.u0026quot; Only those other movies were often conceptually outlandish (and stylish) enough to be sorta fascinating in their perversity.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eu0026quot;Rock All Nightu0026quot; front-loads a couple songs by The Platters, but otherwise itu0026#39;s just two long scenes of people arguing in bars–first comically (at a nightclub), then dramatically (at a dive). At around the two-thirds point all this yakking gets more heated as the story turns into u0026quot;The Petrified Forest,u0026quot; with everybody being held hostage by a couple fugitive hoods (including, yes, The Professor from u0026quot;Gilliganu0026#39;s Islandu0026quot;).u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eDick Miller gets to play his usual wiseguy, albeit a heroic one this time, and future game show regular Abby Dalton plays a bad amateur singer who inexplicably is given more airtime than any other act here. The combination of Corman, early rock and AIP should provide plenty of guilty pleasure, at the very least. But u0026quot;Rock All Nightu0026quot; is really just pretty dull–and in a way thatu0026#39;s primarily like a weak one-act off-Broadway play of the time, with lots of generic angst and generically lowlife characters yelling at each other. In other words, as the Mel Welles quasi-beatnik character might say, yawnsville.”