Cold Metal

By RICHARD CORLISS

THIS IS SPINAL TAP Directed by Rob Reiner Screenplay by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Rob Reiner

Spinal Tap is not a med-school training film, not a slasher movie set in a clinic, not the latest permutation of break dancing. Spinal Tap is, in the words of one enthusiast, "the world's loudest and stupidest heavy-metal band." Formed in the early '60s by Londoners Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins, the group has weathered two decades of inframusical turbulence by mirroring, and milking just about every dead-end trend in rock 'n' roll. After flirting with the transcendelic movement (Listen to the Flower People), Spinal Tap went heavy-metal, with two-hour twin guitar solos and the eeriest special effects this side of Golgotha. The group's album Intravenous DeMilo went bronze (just two levels below gold), and Tap flourished despite the tragic demises of a series of drummers-one spontaneously combusted onstage another choked to death on vomit (not his own). Now the group has come to tour the U.S., and Moviemaker Marty DiBergi has turned down a chance to direct On Golden Pond 3-D in order to document the Tap dance of death on film.

Spinal Tap? There is no such beast. 1 his movie is merely the newest send-up the most passionate putdown, of pop culture's twin inanities: inept musicians and their earnest hagiographers. As conceived and improvised by Christopher Guest (Nigel), Michael McKean (David) Rob Reiner (Marty) and Harry Shearer .Derek Smalls, the band's gnomish bass player), the imaginary band members make up in narcotic solemnity what they lack in talent. Onstage, they steal ntts from Boccherini and Chuck Berry they re-enact the creation of the world and send costumed dwarfs capering around a tiny replica of Stonehenge.

Offstage, Nigel and David snipe at each other like two people at the angry end of a bad marriage. Then it's onstage again, this time at an embarrassingly quaint military social, or second-billed to a puppet show in Themeland Park-all for the perks of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

Until now, rock mockery on the grand scale pretty much began and ended with the Beatles. A Hard Day's Night was in part a joke documentary, while Help! functioned as both parody and prophecy of MTV'S slick surrealism, Spinal Tap forfeits the good will associated with the Beatles for something more bizarre and desperate. 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 will not be a better day. Spinal Tap has as many laughs as any rock burlesque but underneath that rock it plays like Scenes from a Marriage translated from the Gibberish. --By Richard Corliss