The movie is fun. The atmosphere, setting, acting, characters, and dialogue are well-done. I like the music. At only 100 minutes or so, the movie is more like an episode of a TV show than a movie. There isn't much filler, and the climax comes at the right time.

I think that Al, the bartender, steals the show from Shorty, who gets the protagonist role. As a result, the ending doesn't feel as satisfying as it should. One death scene is poorly executed. I didn't like the conclusion for Julia, the singer. Certain character details and backgrounds are neglected. The plot as a whole relies on several coincidences.

But it's still a decent movie.

Like Corman's "Teenage Doll," "Sorority Girl" 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 "fun." Only those other movies were often conceptually outlandish (and stylish) enough to be sorta fascinating in their perversity.

"Rock All Night" front-loads a couple songs by The Platters, but otherwise it'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 "The Petrified Forest," with everybody being held hostage by a couple fugitive hoods (including, yes, The Professor from "Gilligan's Island").

Dick 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 "Rock All Night" is really just pretty dull--and in a way that'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.

Roger Corman's films tend to be cheap and cheerful but this one's mostly just cheap. Mind you, the thin plot (baddies take a group of hostages) has been used for some $100,000,000 movies as well. Thirty minutes of talk, padded out with irrelevant songs. Mr Cameo himself, Dick Miller, turns up in a rare main role. (4/10)