If you’re not already keen on “This Is Spinal Tap,” Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary about a fake English rock band that effectively started the genre, there might not be much for you in “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.” Reiner returns in front of the camera as documentary filmmaker Marty Di Bergi as well as behind it to direct this four-decades-in-waiting sequel, which reunites ex-bandmates David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer).
The last film ended on a Druid-themed glam rock show that turned the band into a laughing stock; in “The End Continues,” well, the end continues because it turns out contractually there was a hidden clause in Spinal Tap’s contract that obligates them to put on one last show. The issue with “The End Continues” is not so much the movie’s quality as the band’s: Are they supposed to be bad, good, or good-bad?
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Candidly, I have not seen the original movie in more than 20 years, but “The End Continues” doesn’t exactly send you rushing back to your VHS or DVD copy of the original. Rather, you might be content to leave it on the shelf as it was.
As with the first film, “Spinal Tap II” is written by McKean, Guest, and Shearer, whose bewigged characters 40 years after their last tour — in which a stunt involving a miniaturized Stonehenge trilithon went disastrously awry, among other blunders — are now far-flung and out of the music business. Vocal frontman David (McKean) is now living in Morro Bay, writing music for murder podcasts and the score for a low-budget horror movie called “Night of the Assisted Living Dead.” Lead guitarist Nigel (Guest) is living in Berwick-Upon-Tweed as a cheesemonger and says, “I don’t miss the friction,” with regard to his globally touring past. Bass player Derek (Shearer), meanwhile, lives in London, where he’s running a glue museum. He’s also composed a symphony called “Hell Toupé.” Say that out loud, and it stirs up a minor chuckle.
A heart-on-its-sleeve, inoffensive, and amusing sequel about the legacies we run away from only to come crashing back into them in middle or later age, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” forcibly returns characters from the first movie played by Paul Shaffer and Fran Drescher, little more than fan-service padding. The film also finds the Spinal Tap metalheads contemplating their mortality once again, as famously they have long had terrible luck holding down a drummer (i.e., keeping them alive amid a string of mysterious deaths). Here, they hold a series of auditions on the road to their reunion tour set for New Orleans, talking to everyone from Questlove to a Blue Man Group drummer, and even Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame, before landing on lesbian drummer Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco, an actual IRL drummer).
Other music world celebrities float in and out of the movie, from Paul McCartney, who incites panic in the rehearsal room, to Elton John, who actually ends up onstage with Spinal Tap and in a slapstick pratfall (and blatant callback to the first movie) that intentionally or not reminds of the singer/songwriter’s own mortal fallibility. Country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood also show up apropos of nada, perhaps just to show the band’s proximity to other music legends and where they’re slotted in a fictional music universe.
This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest, from “Best in Show” to “A Mighty Wind.” Frequent guest collaborator John Michael Higgins steals his one scene in “The End Continues” as a flamboyant personal trainer hired to whip the band into shape.
Fans should be grateful to have “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” as a totally uncynical reanimated ghost of I.P. past. After all, the original 1984 film nearly wasn’t made at all, with Reiner and the filmmakers knocking on the door of nearly every studio and mostly rejected. With its legacy nowadays, “The End Continues” must have been an easier sell. The legacy of the band itself, though? We’re not so sure.
Grade: C+
Bleecker Street will release “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” in theaters Friday, September 12.
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