This Is Spinal Tap remains one of the funniest movies ever, with a non-stop barrage of one-liners and sight gags. So the sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, has a nearly impossible task to live up to here. The chances of it going to 11 where the original stands may not be all that high, but we’re just glad that Rob Reiner and company could finally get it made.
Rob Reiner had been hearing sequel pitches to This Is Spinal Tap for years, but since he didn’t own the rights and there were mounting legal issues with StudioCanal and Vivendi, it didn’t seem like it would ever happen. For some background, it came down to residuals that the cast – headed by Harry Shearer – knew they were owed. As Reiner put it, “Over the years, people kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do a sequel.’ We said, ‘We don’t want to, we’ve done it.’ But then Harry had filed a lawsuit against the people who owned it, because, you’re going to laugh at this, but the four of us had a deal that said 40 percent of all profits will go to us. I’m not exaggerating, but over the 35 years, we each got 82 cents. So Harry said, ‘This can’t be right. We should get a little bit more with DVDs and videos and re-releases.’ So he sued these companies that owned the rights, and we got back the rights.”
But Reiner, Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean weren’t entirely ready to plug in – at least not initially. “Now that we had the rights back, what do we do with it? Initially we were saying, ‘Let it be.’ Then slowly we started coming up with this idea, and we could still make each other laugh, so we started doing it.”
As with 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap, the sequel made use of improv, although the team still got together to bang out scenes and see where the story would go. As for the story itself, Spinal Tap II finds Nigel Tufnel, Derek Smalls and David St. Hubbins reuniting for one final show. And yes, they even recorded at Stonehenge. The film comes out on September 12th.
Will you be checking out Spinal Tap II: The End Continues?
