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Poster for "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey"
How can anyone not like Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey? Sure Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the original and generally much more loved tale of the wild happenings of Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, but this weird and wild sequel has enough going for it to make it stand out from the pack of “cash-in sequels.”
While the first movie had our heroes flying around through time in a phone booth and collecting historical figures like Napoleon and Socrates for a school project, this sequel goes somewhere drastically different with the story: evil robot versions of Bill and Ted effectively murder the real Bill and Ted, who then begin a weird journey through the afterlife. And that journey, though indeed “bogus” for our chaps, is actually quite excellent for us the viewer.
First they end up in Hell, which is a ballsy movie storytelling wise. Basically they are saying that these guys aren’t exactly the heroes that we should be following, because otherwise we would follow them straight to Hell. This movie’s interpretation of Hell is pretty wacky and kind of intense. The crux of their time there is spent in narrow hallways with low ceilings. They each take different paths down the hallways and go into different rooms, each finding something horrible and based on a childhood fear. If it’s not an obnoxious drill sergeant barking down at them, it’s one of their old and gross grandma’s trying to kiss on them for eternity. But if they don’t like that, they can get mixed up with an evil looking Easter Bunny whose intentions don’t seem very kosher. These scenes are all shot with close ups and tight shots and really get across the claustrophobia of being in tight spaces and the feeling of being trapped. The designs and production of some of these characters are pretty crazy, too. This movie boasts one of the least desirable and cuddly looking grandmas ever.
And somehow, Ted knows that the only way to get out of Hell (once you are already in it) is to challenge Death. And literally, they are transported to a dark netherworld between Heaven and Hell where the Grim Reaper roams free. And since this is a comedy, this Grim Reaper has a funny Eastern European accent and sucks at board games and twister. What is interesting is how there is actual growth in the relationship between Bill and Ted and the Death, and by the end, the Grim Reaper becomes the bassist for Wyld Stallyns. Bill and Ted’s journey also takes them to Heaven, which comes across as a more conventional take on this exotic locale (and how much more exotic can you get than Heaven?), and this is where they meet some crazy looking aliens ("Station!") that can help them get back to the Land of the Living and destroy the evil robot versions of Bill and Ted (“We used to be pussweeds, but now we’re metal!”).
Bogus Journey is very different from the original Excellent Adventure, which caused a lot of people who were fans of the first to not really dig on the second. But you have to respect these filmmakers for trying to take these characters somewhere they didn’t take them before. They could have easily made another movie about traveling through time and kidnapping famous people, but they went with something wildly different and pretty daring. How many times have you seen a sequel that’s really a retread of the first film? You can even check out this photo gallery of images taken from deleted scenes that shows how crazy these guys wanted to push this movie.
Don’t take my word for it though. Rediscover the greatness and originality of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey right here on Hulu, where the movie is available for instant free streaming.
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