Rock You Sinners

This film is pretty awful in most respects, not least for the role given to one actor in particular - Colin Croft.

Croft was clearly well into his 30s playing much younger. His attempt to act "hip" or "cool" made my toes curl. Just saw him in an episode of Interpol Calling (from around the same era) as a crooked co-pilot which had the same effect, when he was talking about 20-year old girls.

The film is worth watching though as it shows how hopeless middle-aged filmmakers were at trying to capture the rock n roll experience for a teen audience. Terrible exploitation nonsense. Worth a laugh on rainy afternoon.

This is among the top five musical films that have a dreadful storyline, that are poorly directed, produced and acted.

A lot of the dialogue is spoken as if being read straight from the script, a script that was derived in about 5 minutes.

Lyrics to the songs are dreadful and embarrassing.

The cast are among the most amateur you'll ever see and a slight redeeming feature is the dancing.

Think of 6th formers doing their end of term play and you have an idea what the films like.

I loved the dance hall sequences which looked very genuine and not staged. An excellent black and white type newsreel dealing with an innocent and burgeoning British rock scene. It had to begin somewhere and this movie is ground zero. Early American movies dealing in 50s rock and roll history were pretty awful too in regards to plot and acting. If anything this movie shows us how amateurish early Brit rock really was. Very easy to take a condescending overview from a 2018 stand point. Just sit back and enjoy the humour of it all. I yearn for this era. Rock was so new and exciting.

So cheap the dialogue was obviously post-synced and so obscure it didn't even make it into Jenkinson & Warner's 'Celluloid Rock' (1974) or the 'NME Guide to Rock Cinema' (1981). Yet historically noteworthy as Britain's first attempt at the sort of rock'n'roll quickie that had been cleaning up on the other side of the Atlantic.

Demure young ladies with permanent waves respond ecstatically to calypso rock with a feverish gleam in their eyes which makes them look as though they're on drugs; while one of them flounces off in a huff to create a plot. Not so demure is a pre-nose job Jackie Collins before she learned to write.

Also of interest to film buffs is an appearance by Tony Crombie, who later scored a handful of films for Danzigers.

The only thing worse than the feeble storyline here is the so-called "rock 'n' roll" music performed by a bunch of ultra-square British fugitives from the Music Hall. Since the 1956 American film "Rock Around the Clock" was already a hit in the U.K., it's no wonder that the two best groups here, Art Baxter & His Rockin' Sinners and Tony Crombie & His Rockets, are carbon copies of Bill Haley & His Comets, but they pale in comparison. The rest of the singing acts are so lousy, you're advised to keep your thumb near the fast-forward button. When it came to creating rock 'n' roll, the Brits didn't have a clue in 1957.