Source: Radio New Zealand
Back in the early days of home video, one of the first beneficiaries was a documentary – or “rockumentary”, if you will – called This is Spinal Tap . It did very little business at all until it came out on video
This fake coverage of a fake rock band created its own genre – the so-called mockumentary, the basis of everything from The Office and Parks and Recreation to What We Do in the Shadows.
The creator of This is Spinal Tap seemed to be director and interviewer, Rob Reiner. But in fact, the three stars Michael McKean (David St Hubbins) Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) and particularly Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel) had been doing this sort of thing for years.
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You have to realise that the original fans of Spinal Tap weren’t civilians. They were other rock bands.
I knew bands who would take the video of the film on tour with them and play it every night after the gig. Not because the parody of life on road was outlandishly extreme, but because it was so accurate. Ozzy Osbourne for one couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.
So now the Tap are back after 40 years. The premise is that the band has to reform for contractual reasons – they’re currently semi-retired in semi-amusing dead-end jobs.
And we’re expected to accept that in just one bound they can command gigantic audiences in a stadium.
The appeal of the first film was watching a slightly past-it bunch of aging British Invaders – of which, at the time, there were any amount of role models.
Review: Spinal Tap II: The End Continues At The Movies
Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
Supplied
Forty years on, they might be pushing it, though they keep up the running gag of their bad luck with drummers.
Roots drummer Questlove turns down the gig, for obvious reasons. He’s one of a glittering number of rock and roll cameos in Spinal Tap 2 – most of them people who’d put the original tape on high rotate back in the 80s.
Though my favourites were cult ventriloquist Nina Conti as Mrs Nigel Tufnel, and an enthusiastic drummer called Valerie Franco.
Will she make it through the night in one piece? That seems to be the one bit of suspense in the whole movie.
The problem with Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues is that, like the original film, and all of Christopher Guest’s own movies, the script is just about entirely improvised.
Improvising is great when it comes to developing characters and spur of the moment gags. But a film as big as this needs structure, even if it’s only “band reforms, it’s a disaster”, or “band reforms, it’s surprisingly successful”.
But you do have to pick one.
The highlight of a Spinal Tap movie is often the music, and Guest, McKean and Shearer copy various styles with pinpoint accuracy – metal, prog rock and their early incarnation as would- be psychedelic flower children.
Spinal Tap 2 has clearly had more money spent on it than inspiration. Even when a straight-faced Elton John joins the group in their classic ‘Stonehenge’, they couldn’t overcome the feeling that you had to be there.
And by “there”, I mean the back of smelly Transit van, circa 1986.
Review: Spinal Tap II: The End Continues At The Movies
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
