‘Spinal Tap II: The End Continues’ Blu-ray (review)

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“There’s such a fine line between clever and stupid,” a wise man named Nigel Tufnel said many years ago in a movie called This is Spinal Tap.

Its sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, walks that line with all of the finesse of a dwarf trampling an eighteen-inch Stonehenge monument.

Forty-one years, six months and ten days after the release of This In Spinal Tap—the longest gap between any original and its sequel featuring the same cast—Spinal Tap II reunites the band for a last concert in New Orleans, and… well, that’s it. They come together, they rehearse, they perform. At one point they eat an alligator.

The original creative team is back together as well: Christopher Guest (lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel), Michael McKean (lead singer David St. Hubbins), Harry Shearer (bassist Derek Smalls), and director Rob Reiner as the movie’s putative director, Marti DiBergi.

There’s a genuine sweetness to seeing them together again, and that’s a problem. We’ve lost the one essential ingredient of the original recipe: searing pain.

Christopher Guest once observed in a DVD commentary that there’s more comedy in something that’s almost good than something that’s completely bad. Bad is forgettable. You feel no sympathy for someone who’s wasted your time with something awful. When a thing is almost (but not quite) good, you see the sweat and tears and desperate hope pouring off of it. You feel yourself straining to enjoy it, wanting it to work so much that it hurts. Out of that hurt comes the laughter.

The band Spinal Tap is almost good: that’s the whole joke.. They’re on a comeback tour where nobody wants them to come back, a meltdown that begins with losing the Boston gig (don’t worry, it’s not a big college town) and ends with them following a puppet show at a theme park.

Spinal Tap proves that great comedy isn’t always funny. It’s about things that make you laugh because there’s no other way for the emotions to come out. The Stonehenge post-mortem scene—the one where a cricket bat-wielding Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) storms out after comparing David’s girlfriend to an Australian’s nightmare—is five minutes of pure suffering. The laughs are pulled out like barbed wire.

Even lighter moments can feel like watching the Hindenberg float into Lakehurst, New Jersey. Jazz Odyssey. Shit sandwich. Hello, Cleveland. None more black. When the lads stand in front of the grave of Elvis Presley. Derek remarks that it really gives you perspective. “A bit too much fucking perspective,” David shoots back.

The Spinal Tap we meet in Spinal Tap II is not almost good, they’re rock legends. So we’re told by a string of actual rock legends playing cameos. Paul McCartney can’t believe he gets to jam with them on their twee baroque-pop hit Cups and Cakes. Elton John solos on Stonehenge with all the reverence of Diana’s funeral.

It’s a gag lifted clean from Zoolander, where gorgeous celebrities keep raving about how ridiculously good-looking Derek Zoolander is, even though it’s just Ben Stiller furrowing his brow (this is not the only joke they steal from Zoolander: one scene involves the band failing to understand that an architectural model will be larger when they actually build it).

The hard part is that Guest, McKean, and Shearer actually are legends. As young men, they played with matches: Guest’s ad lib “you can’t dust for vomit” cut away as soon as he said it because his co-stars immediately broke down laughing.

There are many chuckles in Spinal Tap II but no one busts a gut. The filmmakers didn’t make a bad movie. They made something far worse: a sequel that’s almost good.

I refuse to believe that age alone could have made these three as soft and off-tempo as we see them in Spinal Tap II. In the film’s opening scene, we’re told that Tap is only reuniting to fulfill a contractual obligation. I start to wonder if the creative team was doing the sequel for the exact same reason.

But also yes, age is a problem. You can laugh at a young man who doesn’t know the difference between feet and inches. With an old man it’s just sad.

If comparisons to the original This is Spinal Tap are impossible to ignore, it’s mainly because the sequel keeps making them. There are way too many callbacks to Stonehenge. This time, the drummers-who-die gag involves Questlove, Chad Smith, and Lars Ulrich. We also get cameos from the original cast: Fran Drescher as Bobbi Flekman, Paul Shaffer as promoter Artie Fufkin, June Chadwick as David’s girlfriend Jeanine (she’s a nun now). Most of these actors are more famous now than they were then, so seeing them feels like stunt casting on Saturday Night Live.

There is some new blood, but it’s the wrong type. Valerie Franco is phenomenal as a drummer, bland when she’s not hitting the skins. Chris Addison has serious game as the band’s amoral new promoter, an obvious parody of Simon Cowell. How obvious? Well, his character’s name is Simon Howler and he creates boy bands.

To paraphrase one of the original’s classic lines, I do not think the problem is that the band was down. I think the problem may have been that it’s hard to make a comedy about a world that no longer exists. There are no rock stars anymore, at least not any that are too young for an AARP discount. That way of making music, of connecting with fans or trashing the hotel rooms, is as dead as Stumpy Joe Pepys. Rock is rebellion. There’s no rebelling against an algorithm.

So much of This is Spinal Tap revolved around the fractious partnership of David the control freak and Nigel the chaos muppet. That tension pops up in the sequel as we see David insisting on harmonies they’ve forgotten and time signatures that no one can follow (one of the film’s best inside jokes is when Paul McCartney, another legendary perfectionist, tells David just to cut out the bits that aren’t working).

And yet at the end, the bandmates find some peace. Moments before taking the concert stage, David tells Nigel that he forgives him for everything Nigel did. “But I didn’t do anything,” Nigel says. “Then I forgive you for that,” David replies with a smile.

And it is a goodbye, and goodbyes can be hard. Our trio won’t be playing these characters again. Guest, Shearer and McKean aren’t done as actors, but the style of improv comedy they perfected is out of season in these unspontaneous times. Wwe may as well let them go out the way they want to.

The real farewell happens midway through the movie. The band plays “Give Me Some Money,” their early white-boy-blues hit. There’s no crowd around to adore or revile or mock or ignore. They’re just playing for each other. They keep repeating the title line, a little bit softer each time, until they’re simply whispering the words. They fade to nothing. Then they smile, at home with the music they’re almost good at.

This is Spinal Tap took us to eleven. Spinal Tap II takes us down to zero. At both ends of the scale, the song remains the same.

Extras are thankfully slight with deleted scenes and trailers.