When Chubby Checker performs, he has an energy that is almost as electric as Elvis. Dion's writing talents are showcased also. Beyond that, Twist Around the Clock is only interesting as a comedy.You've got older management-types speaking some real hep lines that someone has written for them. While The Twist is being performed onstage, you can see the middle-class, sedate audience sitting like statues. Seriously, no one is even tapping a foot.Finally, dig those bogus songs that are performed by Vicki Spencer. The lyrics are laughable. Really, much of this movie is laughable, and I received some enjoyment viewing it on that level.

***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.

TCM showed a marathon of rock n' roll movies on January 31, 2007 and I taped the entire 12-hour run. I really enjoyed "Rock Around the Clock" (1956). It was energetic and fun, with plenty of good music.Then I started watching the next feature, "Twist Around the Clock" (1961).I expected the two films to be similar -- but I was flabbergasted when I realized that "Twist" was filmed using exactly the same script as "Rock"! The plot elements were copied perfectly, scene-for-scene. In fact, the dialog was even the same – word-for-word – throughout both movies!Watching these two films back-to-back is like a trip to the Twilight Zone -- a perfect example of parallel universes.

This movie is living proof that the same stupid gags used in the teen flicks of the 80s and 90s have now been around for decades and that Hollywood thought as little of teens 40 years ago as they do today. If you like the song "The Twist", as do I (my reason for watching), buy the record. Poor acting, laughably sad lip-synching and a feeble excuse of a plot, among other things, lead me to question why a TV programmer would bother airing it.