This Is Spinal Faucet Will Get a Sequel 40 Years Later, Reuniting Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Visitor & Harry Shearer

Followers of James Cameron’s Avatar are expressing astonishment that its long-expected sequel, Avatar: The Means of Water, may have taken 13 years to get to theaters. That delay, in fact, is nothing subsequent to the 35 years that separated Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, or the 36 between High Gun and High Gun: Maverick, which comes out subsequent month. However the lately introduced sequel to This Is Spinal Faucet tops all of them: “Spinal Faucet II will see Rob Reiner return as each film-maker on and off the display screen together with Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Visitor,” writes the Guardian‘s Benjamin Lee. “The movie shall be launched in 2024 on the 1984 authentic’s fortieth anniversary.”

Critics praised This Is Spinal Faucet again in 1984, however it took time to develop into a revered basic of the improvised-mockumentary style. Actually that style hadn’t exist in any respect, which resulted in some viewers not fairly getting the joke. “When the movie first got here out, we confirmed it in Dallas and folks got here as much as me and mentioned, why would you make a film a couple of band no one’s ever heard of?” says director Rob Reiner. “And one which’s so dangerous?”

Or as Christopher Visitor remembers a pair ladies on the concession counter observing: “These guys are so silly.” The befuddlement prolonged even to collaborators within the filmmaking course of: “I don’t perceive this,” mentioned cinematographer Peter Smokler, who’d labored on the Altamont documentary Gimme Shelter. “This isn’t humorous. That is precisely what they do.”

Such reactions pay oblique however nice tribute to the painstaking craft and observatory wit of Spinal Faucet’s creators. These creators — Reiner, Visitor, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer — inform these tales in the Right this moment interview above, carried out in 2019 to mark This Is Spinal Faucet‘s thirty fifth anniversary. In that point they’d often reunited as Spinal Faucet for reside performances and actual albums, the final of which got here out in 2009. Maybe that’s stored them able to get again into character, pitch-perfect English accents and all, and placed on — as they’ll be compelled to in a plot formed by realistic-sounding music-industry vagaries — one final live performance. However like all belated sequel, it brings proportionally inflated fan expectations: particularly, about whether or not they’ll have the ability to go as much as twelve.

Associated content material:

The Origins of Spinal Faucet: Watch the 20 Minute Quick Movie Created to Pitch the Traditional Mockumentary

The Spinal Faucet Stonehenge Debacle

Spinal Faucet’s Nigel Tufnel Promotes World’s Largest On-line Guitar Lesson

Ian Garbage (aka Fred Armisen) Interviews the Conflict in Spinal Faucet-Impressed Mockumentary

Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embody the Substack publication Books on Cities, the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Fb, or on Instagram.