Film · 1984 · Films · 1980s
This Is Spinal Tap
Scored from 350 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Rob Reiner's mockumentary is presented as a film by documentarian Marty DiBergi (Reiner), who follows the British heavy metal band Spinal Tap on a shambolic American tour promoting their album 'Smell the Glove'. The line-up — guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) — sit for interviews about their long career, an amplifier whose dials go to eleven, and the succession of drummers who have died in improbable ways. As bookings are cancelled, venues shrink and a stage prop arrives at disastrously wrong dimensions, David's girlfriend Jeanine (June Chadwick) starts directing band business, straining the friendship at its centre. The songs are written and performed by the cast.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is a film IMDb files under the comedy and music genres. It was made in the United States. Its comedy subtype is Mockumentary. It is rated R. The runtime is 82 minutes.
350 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 360 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 7,083 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where This Is Spinal Tap lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 350.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
