Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner

Have I Seen It Before: Hmm… Tricky question. Obviously the film is brand new, so…

Let’s just get into it.

Did I Like It: I always say that the the most disappointing* thing that a documentary can be is feel like a DVD special feature. I’m not even saying that I necessarily dislike a DVD special feature. Occasionally they can be entertaining. Occasionally they can have some insight. Often, it feels a little antiseptic, so as to be so careful not to overshadow the film its built to support.

I laughed at several points in the film, but I didn’t have that vaguely, but pleasurably unsettled feeling that this is a work of deeply demented people who have honed their eccentricities into one of the most finely tuned comedies ever made. Exploring the fine line between clever and stupid, if you will.

Expecting that much from a sequel 40-plus years after the original is likely unfair, but the comparison is tricky if not impossible to avoid. The over-under on Reiner and the cast is 80, and the notion that someone can still revolutionize their form seems absurd as I type it.

And yet, this could have been something more, other than an above-average item on the special features menu of a 40th Anniversary Blu Ray**. It could have had fewer celebrity cameos. The thing is chock-a-block with them. Paul McCartney is practically a fourth member of the band, and what little third act the film has is tied to how much time they were willing to get from Elton John. It could have fewer callbacks to the first film. Yes, Stonehenge makes an appearance. They try to make it different than the last time, but it’s entirely too self-conscious to work on its own.

*Not the worst thing, mind you. We leave the worst to Leni Riefenstahl. Let’s just be clear about that.

**Yeah, I get it. It needs to be 4K. I’ll get there eventually. Just not today.

Coneheads (1993)

Director: Steve Barron

Cast: Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Michelle Burke, Michael McKean

Have I Seen it Before: Sure! Any real discussion of my awareness of the film will veer into what I actually think of the film, but I only add here that I have a strange memory of the film having a line of action figures—what movie didn’t have one in those years?—and I’m not entirely sure why. I also was under the impression that there was a day when Subway sandwiches didn’t exist, then this film came out, and those footlongs never left our lives.

Did I Like It: This movie either can’t or doesn’t try to answer or escape from a central question every film has to reckon with on some level: Who is this movie for?

it takes on the air of a family comedy with some sci-fi seasoning buried deep within the fry batter. On that front, it probably mostly succeeds. It’s inoffensive, and I remember as a kid being fairly amused by it.

A tame enough level of ambition undercuts other things the film might accomplish. An attempt to re-acquire the strange off-the-wall quality of the early years of Saturday Night Live mostly fails in service of the need to make a film the whole family can enjoy. Maybe most of the major players had kids. I’m told that can change a person, especially while those kids are young. Maybe Belushi died and everyone sobered up. It probably made their lives better, but the film does sadly suffer.

Another strange flex that the film can’t quite follow through on is the sheer tonnage of its cast. Almost everyone who has a connection to SNL or to well-regarded TV of the age brings to mind the over-stuffed cast of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Whereas that film expands its scope to accommodate giving everyone in the guild work, this film breaks apart at less than 90 minutes, again, likely in a an attempt to be the most risk-averse commodity possible.

Short Circuit 2 (1988)

Director: Kenneth Johnson

Cast: Fisher Stevens, Michael McKean, Cynthia Gibb, Tim Blaney

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, yes. Many, many times. For many, many years the only copy of the film I had was a hastily record VHS taping from an airing on HBO. So hasty, indeed, that we only got the tape started after the rather charming sequence where a toy Johnny 5 careens through a Simpson’s department store. Until DVDs could finally set me straight, for all I knew this movie began with the line “Silence is better than Little Richard?” Weird that I could be so enamored with a film I’ve only seen a part of.

Did I Like It: Ok, so we all know what the problem is with the film, beyond the fact that your relative enjoyment of the film might be directly tied to how close to the age of 5 you were when you watched it. And this is a difficult age to compartmentalize the elements of art, to say nothing of light entertainment. But if you’re wondering whether this movie holds up nearly forty years later, let me assure you with this: When the movie is about (and I am choosing to believe this is canon in the film) a clearly disturbed white guy (Stevens) in brown face trying to get his US Citizenship, despite clearly living in a truck in downtown Toronto, it’s an unblinking, if awkward, dark comedy. Taken on its own terms, however, its really awful.

When the film is a light comedy about a haphazard jewel heist thwarted by a robot with a soul (Blaney) who just wants to understand people better despite losing all self-control when he is within eyesight of a book store (relatable) it is still the film I remember, the one I kept only part of for years, with “SHORT CIRKIT 2” scrawled on its label, that was punctuated with an episode of the short-lived Encyclopedia Brown tv series from the 80s.

There are parts of the film to still enjoy.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly (and somewhat horrifyingly, as it turns out) enough, I’m reasonably certain that this is the only of Carpenter’s directorial efforts (so far… he said somewhat hopefully, while at the same time ignoring The Ward (2010)) that I saw during its original theatrical run.

Did I Like It: I mean, I don’t want to knock a guy like Carpenter while he’s down. But if he were here, I can’t imagine he’d defend the movie. Hell, it appears to be his only directorial effort that doesn’t have his name above the title. Everything here seems like it almost works, which is all the more frustrating. Carpenter making what amounts to a loose remake of <North by Northwest (1959)> is strong enough of a pitch to paper over most problems in most movies. Now that I type this, I think we should all collectively let him just do that. He can do it from his couch. We’re not that picky.

The special effects are a unique blend. We have the pointedly retro, as Chase pulls a pretty eerie echo of Claude Rains unwrapping of the bandages from The Invisible Man (1933), and what I’m pretty sure is some stop motion animation when Chase tries to prove to a camera in an empty room that he is in fact invisible by chewing some gum. It also manage to display some more cutting edge tricks by animating just what happens to an invisible body when it tries to smoke or eat.

And that’s where things start to fall apart. There are few performers that come to mind who are more throughly dominated by their ego than Chevy Chase. Hence, any attempt the film makes to reach for tragedy or pathos in the plight of Nick Halloway have to be immediately undone because in the 90s Chase couldn’t possibly end a film without him successfully seducing his leading lady. He’s not very believable or interesting in the role, and in a trend that was going to come up a lot more as the 90s trudged on for him, he isn’t very funny, either. What else is there? Somewhere in that spectrum had to be where he was aiming.

This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A small note about this screening though. I stumbled upon a factory-sealed DVD at a used dealer at the Flea Market. That’s unusual enough, but the case hailed from an era when DVDs were frequently stolen commodities (kids, ask your parents) and the case had not one, not two, but three security seals on every open end. Those things were annoying to take off in the early aughts, but the glue on these suckers had two decades to seal, and I nearly had to rent a sledgehammer to get to the chewy movie at the center.

Did I Like It: By this point, the mockumentary has been played out to death. TV shows upon TV sows have used the format, and the instant one used that milieu and wasn’t any good, the magic was probably gone.

But this is something special. It didn’t invent the wheel as far as mockumentary comedies go. For that, we’d have to (but probably shouldn’t) look at least a year earlier to Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), or maybe even as far back as his Take The Money and Run (1969). 

Or maybe the better precursor to what we have here is A Hard Day’s Night (1964), because not only does this film tap into that precisely correct demented vein of absurdity that is the lifeblood of every great comedy, but the music also works. That’s directly tied to the unusual skills of Messrs. Guest, McKean, and Shearer. They are at the top of their game here comedically and they could have made an honest shot at being rock stars, had they possessed that ambition. Hell, look to A Mighty Wind (2003) and those three men could have made decent-bordering-on-great musicians of any genre.

As with most comedies, it’s never the most memorable lines that make the film truly great. You can talk about “this one goes to eleven” forever, but it’s the briefest pause the band takes before offering their reaction to “shit sandwich” that I think is both so insanely funny and so pathetically human.

Also, you can’t go wrong with a few dead drummers and a Stonehenge megalith. It’s easily the broadest comedy of which Guest is at the forefront, but anyone’s got a problem with that is the type of person who would let “shit sandwich” get printed in a magazine.