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This Is Spinal Tap Movie Review

This Is Spinal Tap is a 1984 mockumentary comedy film directed by Rob Reiner and starring Christopher Guest. It’s an overrated movie.

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“You can’t really dust for vomit“

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Marty DiBergi, a filmmaker and a diehard fan of Spinal Tap, a British heavy metal band, makes a documentary of their American comeback tour that includes interviews with each band member. This film definitely deserves to get some props for inventing or at least popularizing the mockumentary subgenre of filmmaking. It was the first big film done with that approach, so it was quite influential on others to follow.

But mockumentaries would become much better as time went by and this rudimentary first effort is now rather dated. My biggest contention with this film is the humor, which was that standard over-the-top tomfoolery starring hippies that I’ve never appreciated myself. It was simply not my cup of tea, though I get why some would love it.

This Is Spinal Tap was said to have really appealed to rock band musicians themselves and I can see that as the movie is meticulously approached in representing the lifestyles of these people. It was obviously well researched and ultimately it achieved the feel of watching a real instead of a fictional band, which was its main accomplishment. But in being so meticulous, the movie ended up alienating everybody who isn’t a fan of this type of music or musicians. It’s a very limited in appeal film.

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Christopher Guest was the acting standout, but he would obviously get to start in much better comedies and even mockumentaries later down the line. The editing, cinematography and directing are quite good here, but the characterization was slight, the plot almost non-existent and the dialogue not particularly memorable. And it failed to engage me properly with not a single scene that made me laugh.