Spinal Tap is back

The year of comedy sequels continues with the one I am personally the most nervous about. The trailer for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues dropped yesterday, and it’s pretty good. I got one solid laugh out of it, at the end with the “thinking outside the literal box” joke. 

Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer return as Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls, respectively. Rob Reiner is back as filmmaker Marty Di Bergi, cataloguing the (mis)fortunes of Spinal Tap. The trailer also promises plenty of musicians, presumably playing themselves, including Paul McCartney, Questlove, and Elton John. And no, the drummer bit is not old, and I do like the idea that younger musicians are aware of the curse and don’t want to drum for Spinal Tap in order to stay alive.

But I’m not blown away. I might prefer that, though, to being oversold at this stage. Keep my expectations realistic, be pleasantly surprised later, that is the way. A lot of it, too, will depend on the new music in the film, assuming there is new music, that is. The trailer leans hard on the reunion aspect, so The End Continues could be a sort of greatest hits tour for Spinal Tap. One thing about Spinal Tap is that while the lyrics are dumb, the music is actually REALLY good. Dumb lyrics/great music is the winning combination of other comedy musical acts like The Lonely Island and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, both of which owe a lot to This Is Spinal Tap. It would be icing on the cake if we get great new music from Spinal Tap in the film.

One of the hardest things for comedy sequels to overcome is that comedy is all forward momentum, what is now is built on what was then, and when you go back to what was then, it often doesn’t play as well now. (I’m pretty sure that sentence checks out.) The bit in the trailer about Nigel Tufnel working in a cheese shop is giving “Gene Allen going back to the sausage factory” from Documentary Now’s two-part mockumentary Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee (another fake band with great music). This is Spinal Tap is one of my favorite films of all time, I REALLY want the sequel to be good, but mostly this trailer reminds me of the comedy built upon This Is Spinal Tap’s foundation, rather than convincing me coming back to these characters forty years later will pay off.