Movies - This Is Spinal Tap

Home > Listing Index > Movies > This Is Spinal Tap

	Movies - This Is Spinal Tap

This Is Spinal Tap is a 1984 mockumentary directed by Rob Reiner and starring members of the semi-fictional heavy-metal glam rock band Spinal Tap. The film is a mock rockumentary that satirized the wild personal behaviour and musical pretensions of bands such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, Queen, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and The Beatles among many others.

Much of the film was ad libbed, and several dozen hours of footage were shot before Reiner edited it down to the released film. A 4½ hour bootleg version of the film exists and has been traded among fans and collectors for years.

In addition to the three members of Spinal Tap (Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, all of whom actually play their instruments) plus Reiner, who appeared as "Marty DiBergi", the maker of the documentary, the film starred Paul Shaffer, Fred Willard, Fran Drescher, Bruno Kirby, Howard Hesseman, Ed Begley Jr., and Anjelica Huston. Dana Carvey and Billy Crystal also had small roles in the film.

Plot overview

This Is Spinal Tap chronicles the group's waning popularity during a tour of the United States while promoting their latest record, Smell The Glove. The sexist, misogynist and overly-masculized elements of heavy metal music are parodied throughout. Marty DiBergi (Reiner), a director of television commercials, films the tour and interviews the musicians.

David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel were childhood friends, and ran through many bandnames at the beginning of their career before settling on The Thamesmen, who had a hit with "Gimme Some Money". Renaming themselves Spinal Tap, they had an early hit with the flower power anthem "Listen to the Flower People" before turning to heavy metal. (This would seem to be an allusion to Status Quo who had started out as a psychedelic band before turning to the more traditional rock and roll sound that made them famous). The original name of the band was "The Originals" which they had to change to "The New Originals" because there was already another band going by the name "The Originals."

The film notes early on that Spinal Tap — "One of England's Loudest Bands" — have had a succession of drummers, all of whom have died under odd circumstances: one died in a "bizarre gardening accident"; another "choked on vomit," though it may not have been his own (Tufnel notes that "you can't really dust for vomit"); and one seems to have fallen prey to spontaneous human combustion. St. Hubbins reports that "Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported." This run on drummers was a nod towards several bands; both Led Zeppelin's John Bonham and The Who's Keith Moon had died years before, the former having actually choked on his own vomit, whilst Judas Priest were, for a variety of reasons, on their seventh drummer at the time of the film's release. The Grateful Dead had a similar run in relation to their keyboard players dying and being replaced.

Their concert appearances are repeatedly cancelled due to low ticket sales, and tensions rise when several major retailers refuse to sell Smell the Glove due to its sexist cover art, and when St. Hubbins' girlfriend — a slightly spacy but exceptionally spiteful and manipulative yoga and astrology devotee — joins the group on tour.

"Polymer Records" (not Polydor Records) decides to release Smell the Glove with an entirely black cover, though without consulting the band (four years after The Damned's The Black Album, some versions of which were genuinely all-black, but embossed; and seven years before Metallica's eponymous 1991 album, which featured a nearly-all black cover). This prompts more distress from the band; St. Hubbins delivers the memorable observation, "There's a fine line between clever and stupid."

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for This Is Spinal Tap ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article This Is Spinal Tap; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay