Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Directed by: Peter Hewitt

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, William Sadler

When I was a kid, I LOVED the Bill & Ted movies. I have no idea why. I mean, looking back on them now, I couldn’t possibly have gotten half of what they were talking about at the age of 12, and the ones I would’ve gotten were just two guys acting like idiots as they screwed up time and space, and in this one, death. I guess we were all a little easily entertained in the early 90’s.

Following the events of the much better Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bogus Journey finds our “heroes” preparing for the battle of the bands, the event that will shoot their band Wyld Stallyns to superstardom, with the one hitch that they can’t actually play their instruments at all. Also, there are robots from the future that look just like them that want to kill them and ruin their lives. Which they do. Yep, Bill S. Preston Esquire (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) get thrown off a cliff and die in this movie, and subsequently explore what it’s like to be ghosts, then they go through hell and heaven, until finally returning to life to save their social lives and the entire future from the false rock that their ‘evil robot uses’ would give to the world.

Bill & Ted are so stupid that they’re hilarious. They aren’t just normal stupid, they have a fresh, natural stupidity that transcends mere acting and touches the very heart of the viewer. You root for these two idiotic teens who think only of rocking out (and only in tandem) because you just can’t imagine anything worse happening to them than what they’ve already been born with. When they are sent to hell and come face to face with a gigantic Satan, Ted’s first response is “Whoa! Who’s that?” When Bill reminds him that, “Dude, we’re in hell!” Ted thinks for a second and realizes, admitting, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense.” Writers Ed Solomon (who went on to write Super Mario Bros. and Men in Black) and Chris Matheson (who went on to write… uh… Mom and Dad Save the World?) definitely had their weed-stained fingers on the pulse of the 80’s.

Personally, the biggest thing I noticed watching it this time (as opposed to when I was 12, as I’ve said) was, well, besides the sexual stuff, the music. The soundtrack features artists like Megadeth and Faith No More, and at the end a Kiss song plays as the dumbass duo unites the world with their rock. Not only that, but Steve Vai plays for the solos that Bill & Ted play once they’ve learned the guitar (and if you haven’t heard of him, you are very dead to me), and a very young Primus is the band that plays before Wyld Stallyns in the battle of the bands. Apart from that, the quoting of lyrics from Poison and Blue Oyster Cult songs that I didn’t have any idea of before definitely helped me get a good portion of the jokes… Is it weird that I know more about 80’s bands now than I did in the 80’s? Nah, that can’t be the case.

I have no idea how the youth of today would react to this movie, but I have a feeling a lot of it would fly right by their heads. Let them keep their Hannah Montanas and their… uh… whatever else they’ve got nowadays, and I’ll keep my Bill & Tedses. And Dethklok. I still want that.