The boys are back: More than 40 years after the enduring classic ‘This is Spinal Tap’ hit the big screen, the aging rockers return for a goofy but entertaining reunion. The Local Spins review.
Still a Riot After All These Years: Spinal Tap, minus yet another drummer.
THE MOVIE: ‘Spinal Tap II: The End Continues’
LOCAL SPINS SCORE: ★★1/2 (out of four)
MPAA RATING: R for language, including some sexual references
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
RUN TIME: 83 minutes
SEE IT: Now in theaters; scroll down for movie trailer
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The harsh truth about “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” is that the foil-wrapped cucumber needs Viagra now. This metaphor – crude, yes, and don’t ask me to apologize – isn’t a direct criticism of the movie itself, but a vaguely naughty way of saying its attempt to follow an all-time classic comedy, “This is Spinal Tap,” is impossible.
There’s no feasible way it can be as funny as Rob Reiner’s 1984 film, which invented the mockumentary subgenre by staging a fictional heavy metal band’s petty foibles and larger failures, and lampooning the cliches and excesses of the music business.
“This is Spinal Tap” is still a riot. It’s tempting to just paraphrase its iconic lines for cheap and easy levity: “This one goes to 11.” “It’s called ‘Lick My Love Pump.’” “None more black.” “Shit sandwich.” “There’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” That last one sums up the film’s modus operandi exquisitely. It’s not clever. It’s not stupid. It’s just funny. Eternally.
So it’s probably a bad idea to even attempt to follow it with a sequel 40 years later. Silly. Futile. Utterly and completely hopeless. Not that I’m complaining.
“Spinal Tap II” brings back director Rob Reiner, again playing documentary director Marty DiBergi, improvising on camera with the core Tap cast, Michael McKean as singer-guitarist David St. Hubbins, Christopher Guest as guitarist Nigel Tufnel, Harry Shearer as bassist Derek Smalls and 11 tombstones as the drummer. Yes, 11. They all died. That’s a joke from the first movie colliding with another joke from the first movie, here in the second movie. It’s not the same joke, technically, and it’s not nearly as funny, but I liked it anyway. I’m still high on the fumes from the first time I saw “This is Spinal Tap,” a few decades ago. It lingers. I sometimes watch it for the nth time when I need a lift. That’s what a classic it is.
Part of the dynamic from the first film also lingers – the push-pull creative/personal squabbles between Tufnel and St. Hubbins. Then, it resulted in heart-tugging odes to love, the glory of hard rock and giant butts such as “Sex Farm,” “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” and “Big Bottom.”
Now, the tension has driven them apart for 15 years. Do they even remember why they’re mad at each other? Hard to tell. Tap slogged on until 2009, but now reunites for a nostalgiafest in New Orleans thanks to circumstances that’ll leave everyone wistful and misty-eyed: a contractual obligation. Bust out the Kleenex.
At this point in the movie, I breathed a sigh of relief – at least nobody’s dying. But they are aging. They’re a little stooped and wrinkled, peering down at their guitars through reading glasses. The grudge they carry lives on, too. After the band finally imploded (probably for the 20th or 30th time), they found new careers and pastimes.
St. Hubbins kept himself busy writing scores for true-crime podcasts and telephone hold music. Tufnel got married and opened up a cheese-and-guitar shop in Berwick-upon-Tweed, a town I’m sad to learn is not made up. Smalls built a museum dedicated entirely to glue, the result of someone who probably sniffed too much of his own wares.
They assemble at a supposedly haunted Big Easy B&B and get to rehearsing. Their old manager, Ian Faith, is dead (as is the actor who played him, Tony Hendra), and his daughter Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman) inherited the opportunity to cash in on the Spinal Tap reunion. She hired sleazy promoter Simon Howler (a scene-stealing Chris Addison), who’s physically incapable of appreciating music, to help. The circumstances really get you right here, don’t they?
Next on the agenda is duping someone into entering the crosshairs of the drummer’s seat, and after a comical series of auditions – Lars Ulrich tells them to ask Chad Smith, Chad Smith tells them to ask Lars Ulrich – they settle on Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco), a fiery sparkplug who rejects Smalls’ proposition to take a tumble in the hay moments before her girlfriend enters the room and shares that her grandpa took her to see Spinal Tap forever ago. And his face hang-dogs a little more than it already hang-dogs.
‘Sneezed Into Oblivion’: Part of Spinal Tap’s eventful history.
The guy who embodies the Tap lyric “You’re too young and I’m too well hung” shrugs and takes the L – just like he took the L when airport security made him pull the foil-wrapped cucumber from his trousers in the first film.
From there, “Tap II” dilly-dallies without much urgency as the band ramps up for the big show. Tufnel shows off his crazy-complicated guitar-pedal board, aping the “this goes to 11” scene. They ponder selling Tap Water in plastic Stonehenge bottles at the merch table. (I’d buy one. Right now.)
Howler suggests that the best way to make the show memorable is if one or two band members actually dies on stage (“How about a coma?” St. Hubbins asks in an attempted compromise). A fitness instructor helps them limber up. They work through the good ol’ turgid hits, and Smalls introduces a new old-codger composition, “Rockin’ in the Urn.”
Paul McCartney and Elton John drop by to jam, but are we here for those no-names? Shit no. They never wrote anything as sublime as “Hell Hole.”
The film proceeds with an amiable and pleasant familiarity spiced with a few big laughs. It’s fine. To expect further top-of-the-heap comedy grandeur would reflect a density to rival Tufnel’s intellect. Sure, jokes about Stormy Daniels and crypto scams are already moldy, and the film lacks the ambition to drill into the sorry-ass state of exploitative reunion tours, overpriced ticket scams and Spotify’s quarter-cent royalty payments. Opportunities to build on the first film’s music-biz criticisms are passed by in lieu of offering us a chance to hang out with the stunted morons we love so much one more time.
And probably the last time – if there’s any subtext here, it’s a gentle rumination on aging and pending death: Bury your hatchets, people. You David St. Hubbinses out there needn’t aim death-stares at the Nigel Tufnels of your lives until one or both of you are in coffins.
“The End Continues” amuses us with old farts farting around, which isn’t a recipe for greatness. But the manner in which the Tapsters embrace themselves and their on-screen personas is endearing. The movie’s good enough, and tonight that’s enough, tonight.
SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES (Trailer)
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