Rob Reiner’s directorial debut, the cult classic 1984 comedy This Is Spinal Tap, succeeded because the fake British band of the title — singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and a rotating cast of doomed drummers — was a dead ringer for any number of popular hard rock acts. How perfect a spoof of hard rock’s clichés and personalities was it? Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler told Rolling Stone in 1990, “That movie was way too close, way too real.… Spinal Tap did Stonehenge, and our album cover [for 1982’s Rock in a Hard Place] looked exactly like that. I freaked. I took Spinal Tap real personal.”
The film was presented as a documentary in which Reiner’s character, Marty DiBergi, followed the band during their tour to promote a new album. Already veterans of the music industry, Spinal Tap’s best days were behind them. They failed to draw crowds, lost the support of their record company, and got caught stuffing their trousers with cucumbers. The improvised dialogue made the band’s vapid and pretentious answers to DiBergi’s questions fresh and convincing. And because the actors are also good musicians, they sounded like a real rock band as they parodied the conventions of different eras in rock history.
Spoofing rock documentaries such as Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same (1976) and the Who’s The Kids Are Alright (1979), This Is Spinal Tap made it impossible to take future rock documentaries, like U2’s Rattle & Hum (1988), entirely seriously. And it spawned imitators. British comedian Ricky Gervais has acknowledged that This Is Spinal Tap inspired the original BBC version of The Office, and the success of that show generated a trend of mockumentary sitcoms such as the American version of The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Modern Family. Meanwhile, the boys of Spinal Tap have played different characters in a series of mockumentaries directed by Guest, including Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003). And Spinal Tap released albums in 1992 and 2009.
Unfortunately, the new sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues mirrors real life in quite a different way. As is the case when a real band reunites, it may be fun to see the guys back together, but they’re a long way from recapturing the magic of their best days.
The End Continues begins with the band members having been estranged for 15 years. Tufnel and his wife own a cheese shop in an English village; St. Hubbins writes elevator music and is working on a score for a horror film called Night of the Assisted Living Dead; Smalls operates a glue museum. Times have changed. Their hairstyles haven’t. Reiner is back as DiBergi, tracking the dispersed members for a reunion concert. Spinal Tap’s old manager, Ian Faith, has died, but he had willed his contract to his daughter Hope Faith (Kerry Goldiman), and they owe her one more show.
The timing is right: a version of “Big Bottom” performed by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood has gone viral on social media. That detail is one of the film’s few nods to contemporary music trends, though it would have been better if the writers had ditched the celebrity cameo and instead imagined fictional social media influencers bringing the old song to new audiences.
Where the first film followed the boys through a series of indignities and fights on tour, the sequel focuses on them preparing for a one-night performance in New Orleans, overcoming feuds (again) and rekindling their musical spark along the way. New characters include musically immune tour manager Simon Howler (Chris Addison) and new drummer Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco), a tattooed lesbian and longtime fan brave enough to accept the job despite the untimely deaths of her many predecessors. Paul Shaffer, June Chadwick, and Fran Drescher briefly reprise their roles from the original.
There are a couple of exchanges that echo, rather than repeat, classic scenes from the original. If you like the hilarious “these go to 11” scene in Tufnel’s guitar room, you may enjoy a new tour of his effects pedals. And his status as an elderly rocker is nicely, if not especially funnily, illustrated by his modified guitar that includes room for cheese storage and a cutting board. But I groaned in the empty theater when they ripped off a joke from Zoolander.
There are all sorts of ways to explain why this film is so disappointing, but they all come down to the simple point that it’s just not very funny. The filmmakers and actors don’t capitalize on the personalities and premises that made the original a classic. The improvised banter isn’t nearly as clever, and a tonal difference is clear from the start. Whereas the first movie made clear that Spinal Tap was a ridiculous band whose pretentious members didn’t have much musical talent, we’re now supposed to believe its admirers include Sirs Paul McCartney and Elton John. Those cameos, along with Zoom appearances from various rock drummers, aren’t nearly as hilarious as they probably sounded during production meetings.
What about the songs? When you see an old band in concert, you want them to play the old tunes. It’s different in a movie, and The End Continues relies too much on past pastiches. The new Shearer-penned song “Rockin’ in the Urn” is a clever anthem of death-defiance, yet the performance is weak. The film omits one of the funniest songs that appears on its soundtrack, another Shearer tune called “The Devil’s Just Not Getting Old.” I wish they’d also included “Rock and Roll Transplant,” a song Shearer released several years ago on a Derek Smalls solo album: “Rock and roll never forgets, / but it sometimes has trouble remembering.” Those songs would have given the film more opportunities to parody the current state of septuagenarian acts like Spinal Tap. After all, Aerosmith had to cancel its 2023 farewell tour because the aforementioned Tyler fractured his larynx. And all of Spinal Tap’s members are older than the recently deceased Ozzy Osbourne.
The movie’s high point is the band’s final concert, which manages to bring new life to one of the original film’s most famous scenes (“Play ‘Stonehenge!’” yells a fan as the band plays “Stonehenge”). This being Spinal Tap, just when it seems like things are going well, things fall apart, and a guest star is injured. It’s a clever moment that shows they’re not completely out of ideas, but it makes you wonder where they’d been the rest of the movie.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).
