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How others will see it. This Is Spinal Tap celebrates heavy metal culture, life on the road, and changes in popular musical style. It is celebration by ridicule. The band members are adorably innocent and stupid, even as they write songs with knowing and preposterously explicit sexual content and wouldn't even consider marrying one of their interchangeable road girlfriends.
The punch line of the joke is that Spinal Tap, a fictional band formed of actor/musicians, is a better metal band than many actual bands. Just as the Monkees were better than, for example, The Association, Spinal Tap, although formed for this movie, is better than Uriah Heep or various other pretentious million sellers.
So, we have a good, entertaining concept, an insightful look into an event of popular culture, and a pretty good band, as well.
Yet another enjoyable aspect to This Is Spinal Tap is the proliferation of minor star cameos. There's Fran Drescher, or whiny "The Nanny" fame. Fred Willard is a square Air Force officer. The Jefferson's white British neighbor here plays a homosexual innkeeper. Bruny Kirby shows up as a Sinatra-obsessed limo driver. Dana Carvey and Billy Crystal are mimes. Howard Hesseman is a rock star, Paul Schaffer is a label publicity man, and Anjelica Huston appears in the credits, although I was unable to spot her. Maybe you'll have better luck.
With all these elements in its favor, This Is Spinal Tap will please most everyone who is within an age group to appreciate its subject. That is, baby boomers love the movie. Generation X or its younger ilk will see it differently, as a relic of a past cultural era. But, they'll likely enjoy it as well.
How I felt about it. The first comment to make is that road life is sanitized. There's no drugs, no trashing of hotel rooms, and no exploitative sex. What we do have is a group of deliberately stupid individuals whose intelligence is a function of the situation at hand.
Thus, in a famous scene, Nigel is too dumb to appreciate the hype behind an amp that goes to 11. But he can come up with clever sarcastic comments in the presence of David's pallid peroxide beauty queen, Jeanine.
The characters of the musicians is the key to the status of This Is Spinal Tap. The situations are exaggerated, but probably representative of a tour gone bad. The musicians, however, are fabrications. They are as we would like heavy metal musicians to be: clueless, simple, optimistic, and nearly void of anger. By stripping them of dark side traits or intellectual prowess, we have bits of a capable band without any idea of what was really behind them.