Watch: Paul McCartney, Questlove appear in 'Spinal Tap II' trailer
July 24 (UPI) -- Bleecker Street released the trailer for Spinal Tap II: The End Begins on Thursday. The sequel premieres Sept. 12 in theaters.
Paul McCartney appears as himself praising Spinal Tap's lyrics as "literature." Questlove appears on Zoom, refusing the join the band as drummer given the fatalities of all previous drummers.
Wednesday's first look photos showed Elton John playing on stage with the band. The trailer confirms he joins them for "Stonehenge."
The sequel picks up with the surviving Spinal Tap members falling on hard times. David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) now plays with a mariachi band.
Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) promotes cryptocurrency. Nigel Tufnel plays with an Irish pub band.
Filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner) follows Spinal Tap on their farewell tour. The trailer also reveals the last minute venue cancelation that landed them the gig.
Director Reiner and the cast announced their sequel in 2022. It filmed last year and a teaser was released March 12.
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'Stranger Things: First Shadow' stars focus on humanity amid horror
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Spinal Tap defined a real genre with a fake band
'It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.' If movies have a mantra, this bit of philosophizing by Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) is as good as any. Along with Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and joined by a rotating band of musical collaborators that includes many drummers who suffered from calamitous outcomes, the members of Spinal Tap redefined the ridiculousness of rock 'n' roll while devoting themselves to reality. Considered by many to be the 11th greatest film ever made, Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap began its cinematic tour on March 2, 1984 and, like a bad case of tinnitus, has continued to resonate until it heads back into theaters July 5, and into the Criterion Collection later this year, ahead of its sequel. Culled from over 100 hours of mostly improvised footage, the film spoofs the hard rock genre by following this trio of gormless Brits as they attempt to conquer the U.S. on a tour, only to eventually find themselves playing as a warm-up act for a puppet show. Four decades later, the film's precise satire has lost none of its sting. At once preposterous and completely in keeping with the excesses of the rock star lifestyle, it's one of those rare parodies that ends up more truthful than their subjects. Given the vagaries of negotiating music rights clearances, gaining backstage access, or simply filming at a given venue, the history of popular music is often being written on film by those with a vested interest in maintaining the illusions of stardom. What makes Spinal Tap so brilliant is that it became an avatar for all those stories about performing artists that couldn't be told without resulting in career suicide. This only works if there's deep plausibility in the construction of the satire, a sense of reality opposing the highly polished portraits that bands are often treated to. This unvarnished comedy is buttressed by a band that can actually play, and songs written by the cast that rival almost anything from their targeted era. One need only look to the poorly animated black blob blocking the cocaine booger in Neil Young's nostril in The Last Waltz, or the members of Led Zeppelin solemnly riding boats and horses in The Song Remains The Same between carefully restaged 'live' performances, to see how even the most celebrated music films have always had a tenuous connection to the truth of the music and lifestyle. Meanwhile, some projects that dared to get too close to the actual debauchery of the lives of these musicians saw their projects shelved, the most famous case being Robert Frank's salacious Cocksucker Blues. Much of Spinal Tap's brilliance is found in its use of the tools of direct cinema documentary filmmaking, drawing its form from masters such D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysle Brothers. Their films (Dont Look Back, Gimme Shelter) helped define rock canon, while Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer, along with an all-star cast of improvising comedians, helped see beyond it. By turning the tools of truthtelling upon themselves, the film laid the groundwork for generations of other mock-docs that took a similar tact. Spinal Tap's shooting script supposedly consisted of only a few locations and circumstances and little in the way of dialogue, allowing for the performers to inhabit their characters with deep verisimilitude. It's in this context that Reiner's filmmaker alter-ego Marty Di Bergi arrives. Festooned in a 'USS Ooral Sea' cap that provides one of the film's more subtly salacious jokes, Marty conducts a series of sit-down interviews with the musical trio as they reflect upon their career as they are about to set off on tour. Cinematographer Peter Smokler captured the proceedings with a documentarian's eye, his sweeping handheld aesthetic mirroring Pennebaker's lensing. Smolker, having worked on another celebrated film that skated on the border of truth and fiction, Peter Watkins' Punishment Park, captures the improvisations with the clarity of a seasoned documentarian, presenting the vérité nature of the conversations as truthfully as any non-fiction film. The same level of verisimilitude that Reiner and Smokler used in the filmmaking process was brought to the music. The central trio played their own instruments, and reshoots were done to ensure that the fingering of each guitar note was accurately portrayed. Like the songs of Tom Lehrer from a generation before, there's an astonishing balance between the profound and the silly in just about every note played, while standing as actual works of art themselves. Songs such as 'Stonehenge,' 'Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight,' or 'Hell Hole' are the equal, if not the better, of the Uriah Heep/Black Sabbath/Iron Maiden era of rock bombast that the band's aesthetic echoes. While the backstory of the band was fictional, that's really McKean, Shearer, and Guest tilling away during the sonic visit to 'Sex Farm,' making the border between real and fake band all the murkier. Spinal Tap floods this murkiness with jokes, balancing broad and subtle humor. While the jokes oscillate between the obvious and the cerebral, the sense of realism injects them with the natural absurdity of real-life situations, making their effect far deeper than more straightforward comedies meant to simply mine laughs. While 'mime is money' is an instantly quotable line, as is the immortal dialogue about dialing amps 'up to 11' or the licking of love pumps, some more atmospheric jokes are far easier to miss as they quickly go by. When their Boston show is cancelled, the band's manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra, channeling everyone from Brian Epstein to Peter Grant) tells the band that they 'shouldn't worry about it, it's not a big college town.' It doesn't feel like a joke, more a funny throwaway that simply adds to the texture. Similarly, while 'Big Bottom' is the stuff of poetry, non-musicians may miss that this bottom-heavy track has each front-of-stage instrumentalist playing bass guitar, with Smalls donning the even more preposterous double-necked bass for no discernible reason other than it's awesome. Driving the point home even further, the band invited 18 additional bass players to join them on stage at their 2007 Live Earth concert, which surely produced a rumble that would have registered on local seismometers. The playful use of graphic design also makes the world of Spinal Tap that much more believable. There are lurid covers for the band's fake albums, as well as a poster on the way to the greenroom where the 'p' in 'Tap' has been omitted because the designer clearly ran out of room (poor planning being a running gag throughout the film). Even the gratuitous use of the umlaut above the n in 'Spin̈al Tap' takes a dig at Blue Öyster Cult. The most memorable image, though, comes after their label rep (Fran Drescher) describes the rejected artwork for Smell the Glove: a cover photo of 'a greased naked woman on all fours with a dog collar around her neck, and a leash, and a man's arm extended out up to here, holding onto the leash, and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it.' Instead, Spinal Tap is forced to go with a plain all-black cover, an obvious allusion to the Beatles' White Album. It's this combination of visual and verbal humor—along with cleverly constructed lyrics and moments of almost contemplative normality that are surreal in context, be it the zombie-like shuffle of the dancers at the air base, or the solemn singing at Elvis Presley's grave—that define how seriously the film takes its comedy. There's a complete absence of mugging for the camera or milking a specific joke, revelling instead in what actually comes across as normal for this struggling, out-of-touch band. This truthiness provides the most acerbic satire, one that doesn't need to be underlined, and one that would be part of its lasting legacy. Following Spinal Tap, Guest would take the lead in this genre of improv-heavy mock-docs (Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, For Your Consideration, A Mighty Wind) and in turn help firmly establish this genre of comedy. Other films followed Tap's music-themed path more literally. CB4 and Fear Of A Black Hat probed the excesses of hip-hop, the genre that would supplant heavy rock's dominance. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is as carefully constructed and glossy as its musical genre of choice, and the core members of Lonely Island, from 'Lazy Sunday' onwards, owe a debt to their Tap forefathers (and Saturday Night Live predecessors). Then there's Walk Hard, Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow's exquisite take on the award-bait biopic that helped crush the genre for a decade. Poking fun at everyone from Johnny Cash to Jim Morrison, what makes the satire so stinging is the precision of the brilliantly crafted songs. Mostly written by Dan Bern and Mike Viola, they are tracks—like those in Spinal Tap—so lovingly produced that they feel like they were hits from a former era rather than contemporary creations. Spinal Tap came out as MTV was in ascendance, and the big hair and big sound of heavy metal was soon to take on an even more flamboyant image as the decade wore on, building upon the 1970s excesses to the commercial heights of the recording industry. The bands that would follow—R.A.T.T., Poison, Guns N' Roses, and Metallica to name a few—couldn't help but be seen through the vision that the fictional story brought to bear, and artists in particular found deeper truths in its absurdity. Even indie darlings like Kurt Cobain were in on the joke, and Soundgarden would habitually perform Spinal Tap covers with only a small hint of irony. That blurry line would eventually be erased entirely, as Guest, McKean, and Shearer played stadium shows to massive crowds. Their second released record, 1992's Break Like The Wind featured legendary performers like Jeff Beck, Cher, Walter Becker, Joe Satriani, Slash, Nicky Hopkins, Waddy Wachtel, Dweezil Zappa, and Steve Lukather. The further away from the mid-1980s we get, the less Spinal Tap feels like insightful-yet-silly fiction and more like absurd-yet-prescient prediction. Both Metallica and Jay-Z would eventually copy the band's 'Black Album' aesthetic, and amid the brouhaha regarding Sabrina Carpenter's upcoming album cover was speculation that it was paying homage to the band's rejected album cover. Incurring a 'Spinal Tap moment' is shorthand to describe any concert mishap, with entire lists of similar debacles proving how often fact mirrors fiction. When Beyoncé gets trapped in a flying car as part of her stadium show it's impossible not to think of Derek Smalls trying to extricate himself from an errant egg, and when Slash yells out 'Hello Sydney!' in Melbourne, he apologizes for a 'Spinal Tap intro.' The music of Spinal Tap stands comfortably alongside the rockers that it both mocked and celebrated, while its filmmaking craft is the equal of the form-shaping documentaries it was in conversation with—all while asking why one should 'waste good music on a brain.' The separation between high and low art doesn't need to be there; great art is a delicate mix of stupid and clever. It's by navigating this supposed divide that legends are born, stadiums are rocked, audiences are wowed, and genres are changed forever. Like the lyrics they sing immortalizing the petroglyphs of Stonehenge, Spinal Tap's 'legacy remains, hewn into the living rock.' More from A.V. 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Spinal Tap has a lot of famous friends, slightly fewer jokes in sequel trailer
We get a little nervous, honestly, when the trailer for a new sequel/revival/general nostalgia-based film or television project features a lot of material from the old works it's building off of—something in ready abundance in the first trailer, released today, for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Yes, trailer, we do in fact remember the bit from 1984's This Is Spinal Tap where the dials go to 11; what have you got for us today? A whole lot of famous friends, is the immediate answer, as Spinal Tap II's trailer rolls out Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Questlove to remind us that musicians like This Is Spinal Tap, too. (McCartney gets to play the 'pretending to think Tap are geniuses' game, talking to Rob Reiner's Marty Di Bergi about the poetry of 'Big Bottom,' while Questlove declines the chance to be the drummer for the band's reunion show because 'I don't want to die.') Beyond these eye-catching elements, though, the trailer does give fans some of what will actually determine how well the movie works: Time spent with David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls (or, as we know them in the real world, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer), who do, in fact seem to still have a strong grasp on rock's dumbest semi-success story. Some of the more timely gags in the trailer are hit-or-miss—jokes about crypto and Stormy Daniels are going to age like beef on a sunny day—but the affable dopiness that all three comedy legends bring to their characters is still in ready evidence. (They've also brought in a couple of British comedy ringers to help round out the cast/jokes, including Chris Addison and Kerry Godliman.) (Bosh!) We might feel a little skeptical, but moments like Tufnel rocking out, full electric, with his quiet acoustic pub band, or McKean's blithe idiocy as St. Hubbins, gives us a bit of hope that the film can capture some of the old magic. Spinal Tap II is directed by Reiner, and written by him alongside Guest, McKean, and Shearer. The film hits theaters on September 12. More from A.V. Club The biggest news (so far) from San Diego Comic-Con 2025 What's on TV this week—Chief Of War and Eyes Of Wakanda R.I.P. Tom Lehrer, mathematician and musical satirist Solve the daily Crossword
