This Is Spinal Tap
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This Is Spinal Tap
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 2002.
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 "These go Up to Eleven".
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This Is Spinal Tap is a 1984 American mockumentary film co-written and directed by Rob Reiner in his directorial debut. The film stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as members of the fictional British heavy metal band Spinal Tap, one of England's "loudest bands", with Reiner as Martin "Marty" Di Bergi, a documentary filmmaker who follows them on their American tour.
Plot
This Is Spinal Tap shines a light on the self-contained universe of a metal band struggling to get back on the charts, including everything from its complicated history of ups and downs, gold albums, name changes and undersold concert dates, along with the full host of requisite groupies, promoters, hangers-on and historians, sessions, release events and those special behind-the-scenes moments that keep it all real.
Why It Goes Up To Eleven Indeed
- The film satirizes the behavior and musical pretensions of rock bands and the hagiographic tendencies of rock documentaries such as The Song Remains the Same (1976) and The Last Waltz (1978), and follows the similar All You Need Is Cash (1978) by the Rutles.
- It does add something new trope about "Up to Eleven" where guitarist Nigel Tufnel demonstrates an amplifier whose volume knobs are marked from zero to eleven, instead of the usual zero to ten.
- Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Rob Reiner does provided amazing score. Not only are some of the songs ("Stonehenge" particularly) fairly awesome, but when you remember that they were written as parodies of real rock songs, they become all the more so. Especially the case with "Big Bottom": the lyrics are inane (they are literally about women's arses) but the songs uses keyboards and triple bass guitars for crying out loud. Not many real bands could even pull that off trying to create serious music.
- It is telling that the songs still really work even though they're comical and mostly parody. The follow-up album, Break Like The Wind, has this in spades too, and has a bunch of prominent musicians who got the joke (and didn't take it too seriously) guest-starring in the songs.
- Excellent directing by Rob Reiner. Since Rob Reiner is well-known and appears in the film, most viewers are aware that he directed, but since Christopher Guest would go on to use the Spın̈al Tap template for his own series of Mockumentaries, it's often thought of as a Guest film.
- Very funny and iconic quotes, like:
- "Money talks and bullshit walks."
- "NO, WE'RE NOT GOING TO FUCKING DO STONEHENGE!"
- "There was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf."
- "You think of yourself as a preserved moose?"
- "Enormo-dome"
- "What's wrong with being sexy?"
- "Sex-ist. Sex-ist."
- and of course, "These go Up to Eleven."
- The Black Comedy of all the ridiculous ways the band's various drummers have died, including bizarre gardening accidents, spontaneous combustion, and choking on vomit (but not their OWN vomit).
- Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins), Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel), Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) and Rob Reiner (Martin "Marty" Di Bergi) are fantastic cast performance.
- One of the concerts has the band members coming out of giant plastic blue clamshells in the beginning of the song, but Derek's shell malfunctions and fails to open. After numerous attempts by the technicians to unlock it (including loudly banging it with a hammer in time with the song), it eventually opens and Derek emerges... but by that time the song has already ended, and the other musicians are retreating back into their shells which close up again. Derek tries quickly retreating back into his shell and ends up with his arm caught inside.
- Overall, it started the careers of Rob Reiner on a high note, since he launched his own company, Castle Rock Entertainment, and later more popular film, although some of his later films after North aren't that good.
Reception
Since its release, This Is Spinal Tap has received acclaim from critics and is widely regarded as one of the best films of 1984. The film holds a 95% "Certified Fresh" rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 66 reviews, with an average rating of 8.60/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Smartly directed, brilliantly acted, and packed with endlessly quotable moments, This Is Spinal Tap is an all-time comedy classic." On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 92 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and wrote "This Is Spinal Tap is one of the funniest, most intelligent, most original films of the year. The satire has a deft, wicked touch. Spinal Tap is not that much worse than, not that much different from, some successful rock bands." Ebert later placed the film on his ten best list of 1984 and would later include it in his Great Movies list in 2001 where he called it "one of the funniest movies ever made".