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Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, R.J. Parnell ... see more see more... , Tony Hendra , David Kaff , Bruno Kirby , June Chadwick , Fran Drescher , Joyce Hyser , Vicki Blue , Paul Benedict , Patrick Macnee , Billy Crystal , Fred Willard , Ed Begley Jr , Howard Hesseman , Fred Asparagus , J.J. Barry , Robert Bauer , Dana Carvey , Lara Cody , Jean Cromie , Gloria E. Gifford , Archie Hahn III , Sandy Helberg , Anjelica Huston , Russ Kunkel , Andrew J. Lederer , Charles Levin , Patrick Maher , George McDaniel , Julie Payne , Wonderful Smith , Brinke Stevens , Zane Buzby , Danny Kortchmar , Robin Menken , Paul Shaffer , Daniel Rodgers

Largely improvised by director Rob Reiner and his cast, This Is Spinal Tap looks and sounds like a "real" documentary, with Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest as David St. Hubbins, D... read more read more...erek Smalls, and Nigel Tufnel, the key members of a going-nowhere British heavy metal band called Spinal Tap. The "group" started as an informal skiffle band, eventually maturing into an R&B act called the Thamesmen (their hit was "Gimme Some Money"). After going through a psychedelic period with "Listen to the Flower People," the band mutated into Spinal Tap, a hard rock outfit responsible for such albums as "Intravenous DeMilo," "The Sun Never Sweats," and "Bent for the Rent." This Is Spinal Tap finds them in the midst of their first American tour in years as they support their new LP Smell the Glove, with filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner), who specializes in TV commercials, on hand to document the occasion. Just about anything that can go wrong does: shows get canceled, stage props go wrong, wireless guitar pickups start broadcasting air-traffic reports, no one shows up for in-store appearances, David's girlfriend tries to take over the band, they wind up billed second to a puppet show at an amusement park, and the group teeters on the verge of breakup. After the film's initial release, McKean, Guest, and Shearer did a short club tour as Spinal Tap; the "band" reunited in 1992 for a new album, Break Like the Wind, followed by a full-fledged tour and TV special, The Return of Spinal Tap. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

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R, 1 hr. 22 min.

Directed by: Rob Reiner

Release Date: March 2, 1984

Keywords: funny, funniest, hilarious, roll

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DVD Release Date: July 14, 1998

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Flixster Reviews (9,514)

  • fb223580
    May 21, 2012
    fb223580
    Too slow and too painfully Office-esque for me, but clever and I understand why other people liked it. I'd rather have watched 3 Youtube clips of the most famous moments. It needed to be turned up to 11.
  • fb791220692
    May 8, 2012
    fb791220692
    "This is Spinal Tap" was quite the pioneer...in 1984. Since that time, more recent movies have upped the ante when it comes to both mockumentaries ("Borat") and comedies that satirize the music industry ("Almost Famous" and the underrated Apatow film "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Sto... read morery"). So while Spinal Tap may have been the first of its kind in many ways, its novelty has long since worn off. Still, what we're left with are some genuinely timeless gags (most notably the famous "it goes to 11" scene), direction that perfectly imitates both concert videos and behind-the-scenes documentaries, rock music that is both hilarious and surprisingly decent, and banter so organic it would be hard to tell it wasn't a real documentary if it wasn't all so absurd.
  • mumby1988
    March 25, 2012
    mumby1988
    In my review of Moon a couple of years ago, I talked about the strange mystique surrounding debut features. The first effort of a budding filmmaker can come to define their entire career - something which is a blessing if it leads to future success and a curse if it turns out to ... read morebe their only work of any note. While Rob Reiner has continued to produce great work, with a run of form that lasted well into the 1990s, he has never topped his work on This Is Spinal Tap, a film which created the modern mockumentary and remains one of the funniest comedies of the 1980s.

    The cult status that Spinal Tap has enjoyed for so long is evident by how many of its lines have entered into our everyday lexicon. Whenever a TV presenter talks about the effort levels of sportsmen or the atmosphere at a gig, you can put your house on the phrase "turned up to 11" being in there somewhere. Nigel Tufnell's remark about there being "a fine line between stupid and clever" is frequently used by reviewers, particularly when reviewing comedies. Even lesser lines, about D Minor being "the saddest of all keys" and Tufnell's comments about the album cover ("How much more black could it be?... None more black") have become instantly recognisable.

    From a filmmaking point of view, Spinal Tap is an editing masterclass. Where subsequent spoofs like Wayne's World were constructed from a script, Reiner's was created out of dozens of hours of improvisation in front of camera. The cast and Reiner filmed themselves, keeping the cameras rolling to capture anything interesting or funny that came out. Reiner then edited down this mountain of footage to a lean, taut running time of 82 minutes (a 4 1/2-hour bootleg also exists, and some die-hard fans would hold this to be the proper version).

    As well as demonstrating Reiner's directorial discipline, there are two positive side effects to this approach. Because the cameras were rolling pretty much all the time, there is never any sense of the jokes being staged or choreographed. The humour flows freely - so freely in fact that you may not pick up on every joke the first time round. The other positive side effect lies in the camerawork. Because no-one ever knew where the next joke would be coming from, the crew had to be on their toes and get close to the actors. There is an intimacy to Spinal Tap which you don't get either in Wayne's World or in earlier efforts like The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash.

    The secret of Spinal Tap's success as a mockumentary is the balance between naturalism and absurdity. Even though what the band are doing is clearly pompous, preposterous and egomaniacal in the extreme, they feel like real people rather than puppets of a didactic director. The intimacy of the camerawork, coupled with the comic timing of the performers, gives the impression that everyone involved on camera believes in the stories the characters are telling and the music they are playing.

    Unlike The Rutles, where Eric Idle was constantly winking at the audience, there is never a moment where the performers break the fourth wall and try to bring the audience in on the joke. Even when Rob Reiner appears on screen as the 'director' of the 'film', the perfect little bubble surrounding the characters is never punctured. The performers are confident enough in their abilities and the strength of the material that the audience will pick up on the joke, rather than being told that it's a joke. Ultimately this wasn't entirely the case, with early audiences believing that the band was real, and with Spinal Tap eventually going out on the road as a bona fide rock band.

    Spinal Tap is a satire on heavy metal and the rock industry as it was in the 1980s. It shows how the trends in 1980s metal that we recognise had grown out of both the more pompous, self-absorbed end of prog rock and the harsher side of glam. The long hair, guitar-shredding, lengthy solos and elaborate entrances successfully convey how bloated and theatrical big-bucks rock music has become. The levels of ego and stupidity present on the tour for Smell the Glove are enough to send anyone running to buy up The Smiths' back catalogue.

    The film is replete with references to rock stars and iconic rock images. The blank black cover to Smell the Glove (put out as a compromise with the record company) is a nod to both The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album) and the external, 'bin-liner' cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. There are further Beatles references in the character of Jeanine: she is the Yoko Ono who comes in and breaks up the group, turning the song-writing pair against each other through her peculiar artsy taste.

    The musical numbers in Spinal Tap are brilliantly smart send-ups of songs from the era, with no genre from the 1970s and 1980s being left unscathed. 'Stonehenge' is a welcome piss-take of Yes with their hugely ambitious sets, while 'Jazz Odyssey' looks towards the noodling of Stanley Clarke's 'Dream Suite' or King Crimson's 'Moonchild'. The performances combine the tongue-poking of Kiss with the schoolboy cheek of AC/DC, and because all the performers are playing their own instruments (another plus over The Rutles), we really believe someone could genuinely be stupid enough to not only write these songs but play them with passion.

    Although the satire in Spinal Tap is clear, it is also deeply affectionate. This is demonstrated not just by the musicianship of the actors, but the amount of effort that clearly went into writing these songs in the first place. Had they gone the easy way, writing 'so-bad-they're-bad' songs to get cheap, mean-spirited laughs, the gag would have worn off in 5 minutes and we wouldn't care about the men behind the egos. The fact that Spinal Tap went on to have a legitimate pop career is testament to this effort - they knew how to write so-bad-they're-good songs and play them with a straight face (well, sort of).

    The film also delves into other issues surrounding rock and roll. The band's arguments with their manager, akin to those which inspired the Queen song 'Death On Two Legs', tap into claims about the record industry ruining the creativity of artists by their desire for commercial success. The arguments over Smell the Glove find their incompetent manager Ian Faith trying to persuade the band that the change from their intended cover is in fact a bold artistic choice. The theme of artistic mismanagement continues in promoter Artie Fufkin, a possible reference to Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy.

    There are also discussions raised about whether it is possible to be a rock star in your 40s, the homoerotic undertones of rock (Tap play largely to young male audiences), and whether being 'big in Japan' is no bad thing. But outside of its acerbic observations about rock, the film is also a convincing piss-take of the rock doc format. Some of the best scenes in This Is Spinal Tap are its recreations of earlier periods of music, akin to The Rutles' reimagining of The Ed Sullivan Show. The performance of Spinal Tap's early hit, 'Listen To The Flower People', perfectly recreates the kind of TV performances The Beatles and The Who used to do, with the band on different levels on the stage and random dancers alongside for no reason.

    This Is Spinal Tap remains one of the funniest films of the 1980s and the peak of Rob Reiner's much-lauded career. It takes a little while to get going, and the romantic twist at the end may seem contrived to some, but the vast majority of the charm and the humour remains intact. The Stonehenge sequence in particular, with an 18-inch model descending behind Nigel Tufnell, will still have you in hysterics. When everything is said and done, it still stands as the definitive mockumentary of this and any era, and as far as Reiner is concerned, there's none more funny.
  • blacksheepboy
    February 27, 2012
    blacksheepboy
    A hilarious mockumentary that features numerous memorable, well-inspired moments. It is a delicious film that works so well due to its intelligent, ironic sense of humor, making fun of the rock 'n' roll universe (the stars and the fans) in a very light-hearted way.
  • JonathanHutchings
    February 17, 2012
    JonathanHutchings
    One of the greatest mockumentaries ever made -- a clever skewering of the entitlement and idiocy of rock stars and the ridiculous lifestyle they lead. This Is Spinal Tap, a clinic on improvisational comedy, is the standard against which all mockumentaries are evaluated. In fact, ... read morethe movie was so successful that in the 1990s the fictitious group reunited for a series of live concerts and a TV special, further blurring the lines between satire and reportage. If that isn't the end result of a great parody, I don't know what is.
  • aquateen2
    February 14, 2012
    aquateen2
    If you want to see a sophisticated but hilarious spoof film, I urge you to avoid trashy modern ones like Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, Vampires Suck and just watch This is Spinal Tap over and over again. TIST is the funniest comedy movie of the 80's and arguably the best mockume... read morentary ever made. It's also the wittiest spoof film i've ever seen. Who knew that a spoof could be hilarious and witty and could even exist after Airplane?! It's got a completely original story, extremely convincing acting and jokes and quotable lines that'll knock you out each time you see it. Simply a comedy classic.
  • ironclad1609
    January 9, 2012
    ironclad1609
    This fake documentary about the somewhat catastrophic tour of an 80s hair metal band is done so well that it was certainly taken at face value when it came out. The interviews, bits and pieces from the hotel rooms, back stage and the tour bus feel so random, bizarre, yet oddly re... read morealistic. While nothing outrageously crazy happens, the subtle stabs at the musical genre and the record industry are pretty funny. The highlights are definitely the live songs with rather outrageously bad and hilarious lyrics, mocking and worshiping the different rock genres of the time. It was probably easier to appreciate the film when it originally came out, but as a contemporary document of the early 80s, it's pretty priceless.
  • theoneandonlybg
    November 24, 2011
    theoneandonlybg
    This Is Spinal Tap is possibly the best mockumentary and rockumentary ever! If you haven't heard of this film, read this review and then go out and watch it! I managed to pick up a new copy of the 3-Disc Edition from Sainsbury's for £3!

    This Is Spinal Tap tells the outlandishl... read morey hilarious story of the legendary band "Spinal Tap", showing their highs and lows throughout their career!

    Even though the band was originally fictional, this film made Spinal Tap become a real band, releasing a couple of albums featuring some of their best loved songs! What you will find in this hour and a half spectacle are some amazing moments of hilarity, references to previous events in rock history, and classic lines that you will remember vividly!

    For example, the lead guitarist is showing the interviewer their amps, and points out that they all go up to 11, so if they need an extra push they can go there.
    "Why not just make 10 louder?"
    "...Cos it's not 11! 11 makes it better!"
    "But you could just have 10 louder and you wouldn't need 11."
    "...But it's not 11!"

    Old or young, this film can be treasured as one of the best British comedies of the 80's, and will most certainly be one of the best mockumentaries of all time...
  • fb7018436
    November 15, 2011
    fb7018436
    6 out of 5 stars
  • blkbomb
    August 11, 2011
    blkbomb
    Nigel Tufnel: It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black. 

    "Does for Rock and Roll what "Sound of Music" did for hills."

    This Is Spinal Tap is the best mocumentary ever made. If you are a fan of rock and or metal, there is absolutely n... read moreo way you can't love everything about Spinal Tap. Although the entire movie is hilarious; there are three or four sequences that will have you practically gasping for air they are so funny. Christopher Guest as Nigel is spot on perfect. Guest is the king of the mocumentary. He's directed such classics as Waiting For Guffman and Best in Show. Rob Reiner directed this and the writing team of him, Guest, McKean and Shearer make one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.

    I've seen many interviews with real rockstars, who said that it's almost scary watching Spinal Tap because of spot on it is at summing up the rock and roll scene. From the scene where Nigel is complaining about the food backstage to the band getting lost while trying to make their way onstage. It's all a realistic portrayal of what goes on during a tour. 

    I love every minute of Spinal Tap and I wish it was I little longer. It doesn't get old like a lot mocumentaries do after 45 minutes to an hour. It all stays fresh and really holds up after a couple of decades pretty well.

    Mick Shrimpton: As long as there's, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll. 

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Critic Reviews

Variety Staff
March 26, 2009
Variety Staff, Variety

For music biz insiders, This Is Spinal Tap is a vastly amusing satire of heavy metal bands. Full Review

Richard Corliss
August 19, 2008
Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine

For all its japes and jokes, the movie is really about exhaustion of the spirit: sitting in a bleak hotel suite at 4 a.m. with the bad taste of last night in the mouth and the feeling that tomorrow wi... Full Review

Dave Kehr
December 17, 2007
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

The material is consistently clever and funny, though ultimately the attitudes are too narrow to nourish a feature-length film. Full Review

Janet Maslin
May 20, 2003
Janet Maslin, New York Times

It stays so wickedly close to the subject that it is very nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Full Review

James Berardinelli
August 15, 2002
James Berardinelli, ReelViews

The film is a composite of classic moments, all of which we sense could have happened to any of the classic heavy metal bands -- or at least to those whose members combined delusions of greatness with... Full Review

Jessica Winter
August 16, 2001
Jessica Winter, Village Voice

This Is Spinal Tap doesn't pull punches... Full Review

Roger Ebert
January 1, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The satire has a deft, wicked touch. Full Review

Cole Smithey
April 14, 2011
Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

[VIDEO] Although examples of the mockumentary genre existed before "Spinal Tap" this heavy metal comedy is considered an epitome of cinematic satire. Full Review

Kevin Carr
March 2, 2011
Kevin Carr, 7M Pictures

If you didn't know this was a fake film, you could easily believe it's real. Full Review

David Nusair
February 13, 2011
David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

...a sporadically amusing but all-too-uneven piece of work... Full Review

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    • David St. Hubbins: I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf. That tended to understate the hugeness of the object.
    • Morty the Mime: Mime is money.
    • Nigel Tufnel: These go to eleven.
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This Is Spinal Tap Trivia

  • Name the classic Christopher Guest film that this sound clip is from  Answer »
  • What movie is the following audio clip taken from?  Answer »
  • ****What Movie Does This Qoute Come From **** It's part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy I'm working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don't know why.  Answer »
  • name the movie this quote is from? (1984) ?You can?t really dust for vomit.? ? Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest)   Answer »
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