This was the last thing directed by David Butler, who'd done a lot of TV in recent years but earlier had made a lot of good major-studio features including prime vehicles for Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple and Doris Day. This film purportedly had budget problems, and it's easy to see that it was probably not a great experience for anyone, least of all Butler, who was over 70 at the time and was clearly not the guy to make a mid-60s teen musical. At best, the movie feels like a mediocre television episode of the time; at worst, it's the "rock" equivalent of such bottom-barrel country music movies at the time as "Las Vegas Hillbillys" and "Hillbillys in a Haunted House."
The print I saw was about 13 minutes shorter than the official original runtime, and I assume several songs got cut, since the first one doesn't turn up until nearly half an hour in, after which point they're almost incessant. The music is perfectly decent-Vee and DeShannon were fine singers, if not much as actors-even though the songs here are hardly memorable. But everything else pretty much blows, from the godawful comedy relief (poor Patsy Kelly and Eddie Hodges) to the utterly stupid plot engine of a terribly clean-cut campus "rebel" calling for "complete freedom," which both the dean and the movie seem to think is a terrible idea. This is a movie too afraid to do more than hint at politics, while suggesting that they are Bad. Real, wholesome youth don't have any ideas or issues on their minds!! Yeesh, even the same year's "The Cool Ones" was less antiquated.
Even as fluff, this movie is airheaded-at least the equally silly beach party movies knew not to meddle with campus protest and such. Throwing everything but the kitchen sink in, there's a "flubber"-type subplot involving a wacky scientific-inventor kid (Hodges). There's also some "hillbilly" relatives who show up for five minutes, then disappear. Needless to say, the only things that have any value here are the music and the occasional go-go dancing, and the underwhelming climax from "The Pair Extraordinarire" really does suggest they ran out of money during production--surely the movie intended to end with a slightly bigger bang. Others have claimed "C'mon" is a potential camp classic (a la "The Cool Ones," which is MUCH more fun), but really, it's too lame for that.
