IFDB Review: Spinal Tap: Extended Up To 11 Workprint Edition:

Enjoyment: 9/10I enjoyed the hell out of this edit (One of the most fun edits I've ever seen). Extending 'Spinal Tap' was so obvious an idea but it took Leeroy to do it. The additional material is of such high quality comedy-wise that it's wonderful to watch it in context. I'd almost have wanted to give this 11 out of 10 for enjoyment but I had to drop it to a 9 because of some serious technical flaws which I'll go into.Audio/Video Quality: 3/10I loved the added grain and film damage (and even loved the badly mis-coloured and mis-matched footage), as this gave the film the realistic feel of one of those illicit backstage bootleg films like The Rolling Stones' 'C*cksucker Blues' that bands have swapped around to watch on the tour-bus.However, this edit is beset by manifest technical flaws to do with the aspect ratios and the squashing and heavy cropping of footage (With seemingly no reason). The first half isn't too bad with only a few squashed shots, but from around the middle point, the edit quality starts falling apart. I could understand how shots from the deleted scenes, which were 4:3, could get messed up when converting to 16:9 but... this is a 16:9 edit based on a 16:9 film, so gods know why even shots from the actual film have been heavily zoomed and squashed? I hate to say it (Especially about an edit I've so enjoyed) but it's almost like Leeroy got more and more careless as he went along.It should also be noted that the deleted scenes feature heavy interlacing while the rest of the film does not. This isn't too much of a problem since you can just switch on de-interlacing in VLCMediaPlayer and the prodlem goes away. But you will need to do that to make this edit in any way watchable. I'd have prefered it to be presented at a consistent 25 discrete frames.Having download the DVD it was a shame to find no menus and only 6 chapter points (The original DVD has 32) as I'd have liked to be able to skip forward to specific songs in future.Visual Editing: 6/10The editing in terms of arrangement of scenes and actual edits is nearly flawless. I nearly got goosebumps when 'Gimme Some Money' just carried on absolutely flawlessly past the point it normally ends in the original cut. The only issue I noted, was that the face-sores material semed to be mis-placed (They had them, then they didn't, then they had them again) but much of the footage is played out of sequence in the original cut too. I've got to knock some points off for the aspect-ratio issues, as that is part of the editing process too.Audio Editing: 9/10Great work on this front is all I have to say.Narrative: 8/10Despite how brilliant the new material is, the clean and crisp narrative running through the original film is lost amongst all the new scenes. I can totally see why they trimmed it down the way they did and I'm impressed with their discipline. Far too many comedies these days just put out all the material without trying to tell a clear story, first and foremost. So this isn't an improvement on the original cut but it is very, VERY good and I'll be watching Leeroy's edit almost as much as the original film in the years to come.(By the way, I've posted screenshots of the technical problems in the edit thread)

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