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There were parts of "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" I probably didn't understand, but that's all right, because there were even more parts that Bill and Ted didn't understand. This is a movie that thrives on the dense-witted idiocy of its characters, two teenage dudes who go on amazing journeys through time and space with only the dimmest perception that they are not still playing video games. I missed the enormously popular movie that introduced these characters, "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," and felt myself blessed at the time. But now I'm not so sure. Their "Bogus Journey" is a riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones. It's the kind of movie where you start out snickering in spite of yourself, and end up actually admiring the originality that went into creating this hallucinatory slapstick. The movie begins far in the future, where students at Bill & Ted's University have the opportunity to chat personally with Thomas Edison and Beethoven, and to study such artistic classics as the " Star Trek " TV series. An evil overlord of time, named De Nomolos and played by that gravel-voiced, white-haired villain Joss Ackland , vows to rewrite history by destroying Bill and Ted (played as before by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves ). He has invented robots that look and act exactly like the two heroes, and are just as dumb, and he sends them rocketing back through time in a telephone booth. Bill and Ted are meanwhile trying to win a rock band contest with their own group, the Wyld Stallyons, which includes a couple of girl musicians they picked up in the 15th century. Startled by the appearance of their robot-doubles, they commence their own journeys through time and space in a desperate attempt to destroy them, save themselves, preserve the book of history, stay cool, and meet cute chicks. The funniest thing that happens to them is their showdown with the Grim Reaper ( William Sadler ), who looks just as he does in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." In that film (as most of the audience for this one will probably not know), Death played chess with a medieval knight, with the knight's soul at stake. This time the dudes challenge the Reaper to a pocket video game, and beat him, even after he tries to weasel out with an offer of best of three. Death, having lost, has to accompany Bill and Ted on their journey and do what they tell him, and this leads to some of the funniest moments I have seen in any movie in a long time, including one where the Reaper does a little comparison shopping for scythes at the hardware store. One of the stops on the bogus journey is Heaven, created with great imagination and a lot of light and echoing sound effects and a most peculiar conversation with the Deity. Bill ands Ted handle this summit meeting, as they handle everything else in the film, like two dudes for whom "Pee Wee's Playhouse" would be too slow and intellectual. All of the actors (including George Carlin , who turns up in an important supporting role) have a lot of fun with this material, and it turns into more delicate fun, based on more subtle timing, than you might imagine. Many of Sadler's laughs as the Grim Reaper come from simple physical cringing, as he conveys his embarrassment and lost dignity.

Of Bill and Ted, I can say that I have not seen Alex Winter much before (he was in " Rosalie Goes Shopping "), but I have seen Keanu Reeves in vastly different roles (the FBI man in the current "Point Break," for example), and am a little astonished by the range of these performances. Like Sean Penn , who immortalized the word "awesome" in a Bill & Ted-like performance in " Fast Times at Ridgemont High ," he brings more artistry to this cretinous role than might at first meet the eye. Who is the movie intended for? Your basic "Bill & Ted" audience, for starters -- upward-bound young moviegoers looking for something one notch more challenging than " Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ." But also for lovers of fantasy, whimsy, and fanciful special effects. This movie is light as a feather and thin as ice in spring, but what it does, it does very nicely.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

George Carlin as Rufus

Keanu Reeves as Ted

Alex Winter as Bill

William Sadler as Grim Reaper

Joss Ackland as De Nomolos

Directed by

• Peter Hewitt

Produced by

• Scott Kroopf

Photographed by

• Oliver Wood
• Chris Matheson
• David Finfer
• David Newman

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The Cinema Critic

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) Review

Time: 93 Minutes Age Rating: contains coarse language Cast: Keanu Reeves as Ted “Theodore” Logan/Evil Ted Alex Winter as William S. “Bill” Preston/Evil Bill William Sadler as Death Joss Ackland as Chuck De Nomolos George Carlin as Rufus Director: Pete Hewitt Two robots Evil Bill (Alex Winter) and Evil Ted (Keanu Reeves) are sent by…

Two robots Evil Bill (Alex Winter) and Evil Ted (Keanu Reeves) are sent by Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland) to the 20th century where they try to stop their doppelgangers Bill and Ted respectively from winning a band competition.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is known as an 80s classic, I had known for a while that a sequel titled Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey existed but I didn’t really know anything about it, nor did I watch it until now. All I knew about it was that it had something to do with the Grim Reaper. This has to be one of the craziest and out there follow ups to a classic, and while the reception has been a bit mixed, I did enjoy it.

Having watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, it’s pretty hard to imagine what a sequel would be aside from just a repeat of the first movie. The movie ditches the earnest cheese in favour of outright weirdness. It doesn’t go back to the time travel elements of the first movie and goes in a completely different direction. From the moment it introduces evil robots impersonating Bill & Ted, you can tell it is a completely different kind of movie from the first, and then there’s the grim reaper and hell stuff and much more. It is worth noting that the original title for Bogus Journey was Bill & Ted Go to Hell, which would’ve been a fairly honest title for the film. The movie is chaotic, bizarre at times and deals with much darker stuff compared to Excellent Journey. In fact, I kind of admire how out there the movie is. It really embraces how wacky and dumb its premise is, much like the first movie. The plot itself is okay, like with the first movie there isn’t much to it. It is predictable but entertaining. At times the film skates close to meandering territory a few times and it doesn’t make sense (again like the first movie). At a certain point some alien characters are introduced out of nowhere and become involved with the plot, and they don’t fit into the plot at all. It’s almost as if they were added to compensate for the lack of a huge cast of characters. They really didn’t need that, Bill & Ted as well as the Grim Reaper were enough. Bogus Journey is also not as iconic or streamlined as the first film, and maybe it’s because Excellent Adventure is a flat out classic, but the sequel isn’t quite as memorable, despite its weirdness. Nonetheless, maybe it’s because I went into it not knowing anything, but I found it funny, inventive, creative, and all around entertaining.

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves return as Bill & Ted respectively, and once play their iconic roles very well and they share some great chemistry. They also act well as the evil robotic versions of Bill & Ted. William Sadler plays Death, and he was one of the standouts in this movie, he’s hilarious. Playing as the Grim Reaper, he starts out being rather uptight but grows as a character when he meets Bill and Ted. George Carlin like in the previous movie isn’t in the movie enough, but was great in the scenes he was in. The main villain played by Joss Ackland is pretty weak and doesn’t have much of a motivation, he’s just sort of there to set the plot into motion.

The first film was directed by Stephen Herek, this time it is Peter Hewitt who is directing. Now it’s definitely because of how crazy the movie is but the direction here impressed me more than the first movie’s. Whereas Excellent Adventure is very much an 80s movies, Bogus Journey is very much a 90s movie, and the costumes, makeup and song choices are fitting. The CGI can look pretty bad, especially the green screen moments. Some sequences work really well, especially the hell and nightmare scenes. Those hell/nightmare moments particularly looked like they were right out of a Tim Burton movie, which in this case is a compliment. The locations in the movie were a lot more creative and unique than its predecessor, and a lot of the sets were quite stylised.

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is a flawed yet bizarre and entertaining movie. I like the second quite a lot because of how weird it is, but overall I think that Excellent Adventure is a more well put together, straight forward and less movie. All in all, even if I didn’t like it, I would’ve respected and appreciated it anyways for trying to do something different instead of just repeating the same notes of the predecessor. I’m interested to see what Bill & Ted Face the Music turns out to be, especially as it’s made 3 decades after Bogus Journey.

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Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

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Amiable slackers Bill and Ted are once again roped into a fantastical adventure when De Nomolos, a villain from the future, sends evil robot duplicates of the two lads to terminate and replace them. The robot doubles actually succeed in killing Bill and Ted, but the two are determined to escape the afterlife, challenging the Grim Reaper to a series of games in order to return to the land of the living.

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Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey Reviews

With its greater resources, the film enjoys more sets, more props, and more computer animation - none of which increases the quality or the entertainment value.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 2, 2022

Having an actual bad guy changes the dynamic to something less fun and more serious... but the inclusion of Death as a wild card provides a new too-serious foil for Bill and Ted to happily torment.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 1, 2020

An extraordinary grab bag of conceits and jokes, unified only in that Winters and Reeves treat everything with the same effortless merriment and slacker philosophy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 24, 2020

Wacky and weird and nonsensical, it's hardly satire but the sheer invention of their ludicrous journey will have most dudes rolling on the floor.

Full Review | Aug 4, 2017

William Sadler steals the film with his hilarious turn as The Grim Reaper ... but aside from a few chuckles, the remainder is overstuffed and overindulgent.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 2, 2016

Once Bill and Ted get out of hell, though, their film loses it -- in more ways than one.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 29, 2016

It is Sadler, as Death, who makes this film the partial pleasure it is.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 29, 2016

Sorry, dudes: This is a totally bogus sequel.

Full Review | Jul 29, 2016

Reeves and Winter are clearly having a wonderful time. The enthusiasm is contagious.

In Bill & Ted`s Bogus Journey, the laugh is on moviegoers. Teens may call it triumphant, but most folks will find the insipid film a totally non-non-non- non-heinous (i.e. egregiously bad) trip to nowhere... and beyond.

It's playful, funny and finishes far too quickly.

In almost every respect, Bogus Journey is better than the original: more imaginative, more opulent, wilder and freer, more excitingly visualized.

High-tech special effects come to the rescue of the party dudes in this uneven sequel that has some big laughs and plenty of repetitive jokes.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey goes awry, however, in seeking to entertain two different audiences -- fans of Excellent Adventure and the children who have become fond of the TV cartoon based on the successful 1989 original.

All things considered, I would rather play Twister.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 29, 2016

Bill and Ted have a guileless, immediate way of dealing with the world that makes them both very likeable and highly entertaining to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 29, 2016

Perhaps even smarter than the original as it expands the potential for the surreal and ties up all the loose ends, managing, quite remarkably, to give its own pointlessness a purpose.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 29, 2016

The new movie, which is about how the scruffy pair save the world (or something), sends them to heaven and hell and everywhere in between. The sets are impressive, but the joke has worn perilously thin.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Sep 7, 2011

An anarchic motion picture, but reveals triumphant originality -- a sublime daredevil of a film that authentically assumes a great deal of risk. Not many sequels can lay claim to that.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 20, 2011

Slackers meet Satan in not-quite-so-excellent adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 14, 2010

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Classic Review: ‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’ Better Then the Original

Readers immediately asked for a follow up to Monday’s post on Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure . I’d planned on watching the sequel, anyway, so happily our purposes aligned.

This was only my third viewing of  Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey . My dad took me and a friend to see it in the theater  back in 1991 . Like most people, I forgot about the series for years.

Fast forward to 2003. I was enjoying an evening of video gaming at a buddy’s house when cravings for a late-night snack struck our host. He called Pizza Hut, who told him they were  running a promotion  that included a large pizza and his choice of back list DVD.

He chose wisely.

All that’s to say that the intervening seventeen years thoroughly cleansed my palette and prepared me to approach the movie with fresh eyes.

If you read my review of the first Bill & Ted movie, you know I regard it as an underappreciated if flawed gem. How does its controversial sequel hold up?

Short answer: even better.

My main problems with the first film mainly pertained to the craft level. Bogus Journey immediately fixes these issues by introducing a central antagonist who front-loads the conflict and lays out the initial stakes. Just as importantly, it improves upon its predecessor’s “and then” plotting with a story structure whose every transition can be described with “but” or “therefore”. That factor keeps the pacing tight.

There’s even a try-fail cycle that sees our heroes–and they  are  heroes in the classical sense–attempt to raise the hue and cry over their own murders.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Bogus Journey’s central premise is either its crown jewel or its worst failing, depending on who you ask. Viewers who liked the first movie primarily for its time travel plot and expected more of the same were disappointed. Fans of the series’ main characters who enjoyed watching them get mixed up in–and strive to extricate themselves from–zany capers well above their pay grade were in for a rare treat.

There are two ways to approach a sequel:

• Tell the first story over again.
• Take a risk.
• Excellent Adventure : Bill and Ted must travel through time so they can ace their history final exam and thereby preserve the future hippie utopia their music will inspire.
• Bogus Journey :  Bill and Ted must defy Satan and challenge Death himself to save not just the future fruitopia, but the mothers of their future children and their own eternal souls.

But even this heroic virtue is a candle against the sun of our heroes’ moral worth.

Not only do Bill and Ted mirror their future brides’ chastity–their single lapse occurs when their ghosts playfully look down their former stepmother’s blouse–their stated intent from the beginning is to earn enough from their craft to provide for a family.

This goal is voiced at a point in the first act customarily reserved for the protagonist’s “I want” statement. This vital piece of dialogue establishes the hero’s motivation and the victory conditions he must attain against the villain’s opposition.

It’s significant that Bill and Ted’s “I want” statement includes earning enough to get married and raise children. The movie tells us in no uncertain terms that its heroes are motivated by masculine virtue.

That mustard seed of virtue, watered by our heroes’ own blood, grows throughout the film to delve deep roots and spread strong branches. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider:

Bill and Ted persevere in love of their fiancées despite vicious deceptions played by their wicked doppelgangers. Their first and only impulse is to pursue and reconcile with their beloveds.

This noble desire persists even in the face of severe obstacles, up to and including death. Our heroes never back down, not even when threatened with eternal damnation. Nor is their perseverance due to rashness. Bill and Ted may lack intellectual brilliance, but the stakes are clearly and repeatedly explained to them at every step, and they show that they understand.

Bill and Ted are not possessed of foolhardiness. Instead, they possess perfect mastery of the cardinal virtue of fortitude.

The laudable temperance and perfect courage the protagonists display suffice to qualify them as heroes. The movie could have stopped its two leads’ moral advancement there, with their future rule completely justified.

But once again, Bogus Journey refuses to be satisfied with temporal excellence and reaches for the brass ring of the transcendent.

In the course of their journey, Bill and Ted meet the Lord God Almighty.

And their first, natural impulse is to praise Him for the wondrous works He has made, delivered in a spirit of childlike joviality.

And their praise of God’s creation ascends to praise of the Creator for the sake of His own goodness and justice.

True, Bill and Ted sinned along the way, but for these offenses they make unreserved and honest confession.

Having reached their spiritual journey’s apex, Bill and Ted receive directly from God the theological virtues which build on their solid foundation of natural virtue. Their courage, temperance, and justice are perfected with faith, hope, and charity.

As such, they receive God’s blessing and assistance in fulfilling their calling.

Brief but related aside: Many commenters, even those who like the movie, point to main antagonist Chuck De Nomolos as a weak villain.

They view the movie through a Modernist lens, because in setting their villain against heroes confirmed in transcendent virtue, they magnify his evil.

De Nomolos wants order. He is dissatisfied with the future utopia sustained by Bill and Ted’s music and is convinced he can do better. Yet he has no evidence that a society based on his ideas would be superior. He is gambling that his intelligence can make a better world than one with no poverty or war. His hubris would be enough to establish him as a villain.

The fact that he is defying the Mandate of Heaven which Bill and Ted have received makes De Nomolos ungodly over and above prideful. He schemes in violation of the  Third Beatitude . God wills that the supremely meek Bill and Ted shall govern the earth. In attempting to thwart their kingship, De Nomolos sets himself against God’s plan.

To traditionalists who object that the movie unfairly demonizes a law and order leader intent on reforming a culture of day-glo hippies, I counter that De Nomolos is in rebellion against divine right kings–a grave sin that he’d best amend unless he thinks he can beat Death at Battleship.

To rein in the gushing for a moment, I will admit that while Bogus Journey is in some ways a transcendent film, it’s not a perfect film. The dialogue is rife with inside jokes that the writers took way too far, e.g. the obnoxious repetition of “station”. Similar self-indulgence is on display in the chant Missy uses to exorcise Bill and Ted’s ghosts: “Ed and Chris will rule the world” spoken backwards.

As mentioned above, the sophomoric sins committed by our otherwise pure heroes strike an unnecessarily dissonant note. They just plain feel out of character.

Nevertheless,  Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey  remains a master class in how to make a sequel. Take a risk. Raise the stakes. Make it personal. Expand the conflict’s moral dimension, not just its physical scope.

And as always,  don’t give money to people who hate you .

Originally published here .

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Why 'Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey' Is An All-Time Great Comedy Sequel

Comedy sequels often fail spectacularly and rarely become classics worthy of their originals. Look no further than films like Major League II , Caddyshack II , Weekend at Bernie’s II , or The Hangover: Part II that all landed with momentous thuds. Many comedy sequels fail because they attempt to extend a one-joke premise, padding additional mythology on a story that worked due to its simplicity. The joy of seeing comedic banter develop can also deplete; if the unusual pairing of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones came as a surprise in the first Men in Black , it was tiresome by the time of Men in Black II .

However, these are common flaws that the Bill & Ted franchise managed to avoid. 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was a surprising hit, and it may have been easy to essentially replicate the first film’s premise and put together a hastily constructed follow up. There was an easy, safe route the sequel could’ve gone, with Bill S. Preston ( Alex Winter ) and Theodore Logan ( Keanu Reeves ) about to fail a college exam and forced to rely once again on their time traveling telephone booth to transport them across history. Thankfully, screenwriters Ed Soloman and Chris Matheson didn’t go that direction and constructed a darker, weirder sequel that took the Wyld Stallyns in a new direction without forgetting why the first film’s humor worked.

30 years after its debut, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey stands as one of the all-time great comedy sequels because it didn’t simply repeat the same jokes. The film only briefly brings back punchlines from the first installment in order to refamiliarize the viewer with the characters, and show why they’re such loveable losers. Bill and Ted’s musical abilities haven’t grown any stronger in the time that passes between the two movies, and they’re frequently outperformed by their brides from the 15th Century.

Any perceptions that the sequel would be covering too much familiar territory is shattered early on. Within the first act, Bill and Ted are murdered by cyborg clones of themselves and sent to hell, where they’re forced to bargain with Death himself, played brilliantly by William Sadler. In the land of the living, the cyborg replicants sent by an evil former gym teacher have taken over their bodies and wreak havoc on the Wyld Stallyns ’ plans to enter the San Dimas Battle of the Bands, a competition that would solidify the utopian futuristic society that is crafted within their image.

RELATED: ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ Review: A Most Triumphant High Note to End the Trilogy

Although the story is different, Bogus Journey understands exactly what elements made the original film fun. The optimistic energy is still there between Winter and Reeves, and the idea that these two seemingly dim-witted characters are the landmarks of a brighter future is maintained. Thankfully, the film doesn’t pit the two against each other with an unnecessary conflict, and the actual off-screen friendship that developed between Winter and Reeves makes their chemistry even stronger.

There’s also a ticking time clock they face, as the threat of losing the Battle of the Bands fulfills the same threat that failing the history exam did in Excellent Adventure. The stakes are raised even higher due to the robotic clones, whose entry into the contest adds tension to Bill and Ted’s escape from the underworld. The threat is also a personal one, as the clones torment Bill and Ted’s respective fiancees Elizabeth ( Annette Azcuy ) and Joanna ( Sarah Trigger ), right after they’ve proposed. If the two medieval “babes” were little more than trophies in the first film, they actually develop as characters in the sequel. It’s the rare comedy sequel that takes time to flesh out female characters that were ignored previously, and the two princesses aid in crafting the film’s show-stopping final number.

The nightmare sequences descend into some genuinely horrific imagery (it was originally titled Bill & Ted Go to Hel l) as Bill and Ted face off against traumatic memories. For Bill, it’s a kiss from his sinister-looking grandmother, and for Ted it’s a vicious Easter Bunny. The pair’s ingenuity is highlighted as they square off against the Grim Reaper in a series of games like Battleship, Clue, Electric Football and Twister. The clever parody of the chess match against Death in Ingmar Bergman ’s The Seventh Seal is another sign that these films are a lot smarter than they’re given credit for.

While comedy sequels like Caddyshack II failed to introduce new characters that merge with the existing ones, Reaper is a fun third wheel that tags along in Bill and Ted’s misadventures. Sadler delivers lines like a sad sack who has become depressed by his inability to frighten the duo, and the empathy Bill and Ted give him reminds of how open-minded they are, and thus why they’re the basis of a utopia. The great makeup work and Sadler’s performance add physical comedy that wasn’t there previously, particularly when the trio attempts to navigate their way through Heaven.

The film also leans into weirder sci-fi elements, particularly as the gang recruits the genius alien duo Station, allowing Bogus Journey to distinguish itself from the lampooning of historical figures in the first film. It also sets up a different type of finale; Excellent Adventure ends with Bill and Ted expressing themselves and solidifying their ideal future, while Bogus Journey comes down to an epic musical battle between good and evil.

The ending montage set to KISS’s “God Gave Rock ‘N’ Roll To You” is purely infectious and ties up loose story ends. Bill and Ted show development as characters and musicians, growing into their responsibilities as leaders and finally learning to play their instruments. It’s ironic that most comedy sequels forget that characters actually need to develop, and Bogus Journey pits its titular leads against a challenge that they overcome and learn from. The intergalactic rock concert that follows (and Reaper’s subsequent lip-syncing scandal) comes as the fun reward.

Last year’s Bill & Ted Face The Music was heralded as a novelty, as it’s rare for a trilogy to end with three equally strong installments, and it’s even less often that this happens with a comedy franchise. The Bill & Ted trilogy contain three installments bound by their optimism and wit, yet distinguishable for their different approaches to the material. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey proved this franchise was sustainable, and three decades later it stands as one of the greatest comedy sequels of all-time.

KEEP READING: Facing the Music: Why It Took Over a Decade to Make ‘Bill and Ted 3’

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Classic Movie Review – Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

While Excellent Adventure was indeed splendiferously excellent, Bogus Journey , as it says on the box, is a bit bogus. It’s worth seeing — and seeing again right now — to prep for the new Bill & Ted trilogy capper Bill & Ted: Face the Music .

What was Most Excellent

As with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure , the time travel plays it fair, by their own goofy rules. As before, in a telephone booth. I don’t know if that’s a nod to the TARDIS in Dr. Who, but it makes some weird kind of subconscious collective pop culture sense. I like the Circuits of Time Directory and the infinity symbol phone button.

The booth also travels in space, so this is really a Space & Time Machine , but most movies never get this right, so it’s easily forgiven. Maybe part of the numbers they dial have a…lol…’area’ code.

On my next trilogy rewatch I’d like to just make notes about the time machine and see how many paradoxes it creates and if it cheats.

A couple of B&Ts time traveling rules:

• The booth gets sucked down to leave, and dropped from the sky to arrive.
• Time also seems to somehow keep ticking while traveling, so an hour spent in the past or future counts against the total time travel available. (Just like in Primer . I think.)
• Higher punched numbers go to the future, and lower numbers to the past (as with a certain DeLorean).
• To be honest, in a funky little film series like Bill & Ted I don’t expect causative temporal mechanics, but it’s certainly a bonus, and they’re pulling it off better than Back to the Future  (so it’s got that going for them).

Death, as implied from the end credits in Excellent Adventure , was a scene stealing son of a succubus in Bogus Journey . Death is clearly the hero of his own story. Many splendid kudos to William Sadler for a really interesting performance. I’m glad he’s back in Face the Music . Like with the Minions , the Grim Reaper could have his own spin-off.

Also, the callback to Captain Kirk and the Vasquez Rocks was a neat little Easter Egg for sci-fi fans.

Bill & Ted themselves continued their winsome slacker ways, and make me want to both insert my already prodigious vocabulary into normal discourse,  and also be more excellent to people. These ‘losers’ have something we could all take to heart: it’s better to be happy with ourselves and show love to our friends than to fit society’s expectations.

Although saving the world is nice too.

What was Sorely Bogus

The villain was overplayed and boring. I don’t have much to say about him. Thankfully, he’s not in it much.

The Evil Bill & Ted robots were okay. The Good Bill & Ted robots were okay too. Faint praise for each set.

‘Station’ the super smart being(s) was…strange. I didn’t find any of that station-speak amusing and I’m wondering what I missed. Was this funny if you got the joke? Is this a thing? Did you walk around saying ‘ Station ‘ when this came out? (It’s no ‘ I am Groot’ …sorry.) Just checking: Station — as a term — did make it into the Urban Dictionary, but only in reference to the 1991 Bill & Ted movie.

So, overall.

The scenes in Hell were silly, and not in the slap-dash-happy way. From the time Bill & Ted saw Satan, to being stuck in their personal versions of Hell, I was yawning. Not as amusing as they hoped; it went on too long.

In the spirit of RunPee, a great Peetime starts from seeing Satan on those floating rocks and goes a couple of minutes with the boys crawling around through tunnels. A Peetime freebie!  

Sadly, Hell is lukewarm. Also, far from being an interesting set piece, their Heaven is as dishwater dull as Hell. (Yeah, Heaven was…people playing chess and wearing white? Wandering around a Grecian ruin, murmuring for eternity?)

Death is the man

I missed the Excellent crew of Billy the Kid, Beethoven, “So-crates”, et all from the first adventure, crammed into one telephone booth slash time machine. Team Bogus  was okay. Maybe this was subtly intentional to be…bogus? I don’t think this film is that self-aware. Thankfully, in Face the Music , much of the ensemble magic is back.

However, yay, the ‘games’ section in Bogus , where Bill & Ted play Death for massive stakes, is worth the price of admission alone. Twister, Battleship — all good vintage fun. And now I wonder how Death would handle Operation . That might be right up his alley.

Basically, just pay attention to Death in the background while everything else happens in the foreground in Bogus Journey . Listen in too: Death has the most bodacious throwaway lines.

Grading the Journey

I want to grade Bogus Journey with nostalgia-tinted glasses, but have to draw the line. There are too many scenes that, as Ted would say, suck. It’s a middling middle movie. Death singlehandledly keeps this movie in the B range. So let’s mark it in the low Bs and move onto the finale: Face the Music .

Movie Grade: B-

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Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey Review

03 Jan 1992

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey

One very satisfying aspect of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was its refusal to redeem the pair, allowing them to depart as stupid as they arrived. Useful for a sequel too, as without any acquired wisdom Bill & Ted's dedicatedly dumb surfer cool (the characters' central joke) can remain impervious to accepted logic and the first film's lunatic humour need not be diminished.Bogus Journey begins with what was hinted at in Excellent Adventure - that in the future Bill & Ted culturally dominate the planet. (It presumes a more-than-working knowledge of the first film, and so wastes no time.) However, the wicked DeNomolus is about to travel back to 1990 (where Bill & Ted have left school and dream of stardom with their awful heavy metal band), kill the guys and replace them with looklike, thoroughly nasty androids, "the evil robot usses". While this creates confusion in town, Bill & Ted appear to be breezing through the hereafter: they, literally, gamble with death and beat the Grim Reaper at parlour games like Twister and Cluedo; hang out in Hell ("Just like an Iron Maiden album cover"); visit Heaven to get help in making their own androids ("the good robot usses"); and return to "save the babes". All with the same idiot expressions of perplexed optimism and still unable to play their guitars.Every bit as acutely observed as its predecessor - all sorts of verbal asides and background visual gags supplement the free-flowing main jokes, Winter & Reeves (Bill & Ted) achieve new levels as teenage morons and the supporting cast (notably Sadler as the foppish Grim Reaper) play out the ridiculousness with the dryest of Pythonesque straight faces.

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Film / Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

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The popularity of the first Bill & Ted film prompted Nelson and Orion to release a sequel two years later. Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland), a rebel from Rufus's utopian future, wants to replace it with a militaristic Crapsack World . He plans to accomplish this by sending Evil Robot duplicates into the past, where they will kill the boys, then deliver a disparaging speech worldwide at a "Battle of the Bands" concert contest and destroy Wyld Stallyns' reputation forever.

With a minimum amount of effort, the robots succeed in killing off the two title characters. However, their spirits refuse to go quietly into the good night and face off against the Grim Reaper ( William Sadler ). While the evil robots make time with the guys' princess babes, the ghosts of Bill and Ted need to find a way to resurrect themselves, defeat the evil robot "usses" and stop Chuck De Nomolos. To do so, they must go through Heaven and Hell (literally, plus Kirk's Rock ) to face their personal demons and gather allies to their cause.

The second movie features the following totally metal tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance : It's indicated in the ending montage that Death somehow won the Indy 500. On foot. ("I didn't know I could run that fast.")
• All Part of the Show : Everyone not directly involved thinks that the climactic battle is just a really elaborate stage show.
• And That's Terrible : Bill and Ted have to mug some people in Heaven, and they admit it was not a good thing.
• Artistic License – Space : The picture that accompanies the "Wyld Stallyns to Play Mars" has a picture of Jupiter's moon Io.
• Artistic License – Sports : The aforementioned Grim Reaper winning the Indy 500 on foot .
• Back from the Dead : Evil Robot Bill & Ted kill the originals, but they eventually come back to life after beating Death in a number of board games .
• Badass Creed : De Nomolos and his followers have a pretty impressive villainous one: "What is the fuel?" " FEAR! " "What is the engine?" " DISCIPLINE! " "What is the ideal?" " ORDER! " "And how do we achieve it?" " DEATH TO BILL AND TED! "
• Big Red Devil : The duo flag the attention of a gigantic one in Hell who sends them to live their own personal Hells.
• Bound and Gagged : The princesses by the Evil Robot Bill & Ted near the end, along with Unwilling Suspension since they're goign to drop them from the rafters after the show ends.
• Burger Fool : Off-screen, Bill and Ted work for "Pretzels and Cheese" in order to support the band.
• Butt-Monkey : Death of all people. He is repeatedly humiliated, first when Bill and Ted wedgie him to escape. Then he undergoes a series of embarrassing defeats at board games, is forced to appear before God in drag, suffers repeated comedic injuries on Earth, and finally he can't even catch a break when he becomes part of the band that saves the world. His solo albums fail spectacularly, and was also part of a lip-sync scandal. At least he won the Indianapolis 500 .
• The time machine arrives outside the Circle K, as in the first film, though without any particular reason this time (indeed, it's a different Circle K).
• Bill and Ted initially assume that the robots are future versions of themselves, referencing when they crossed paths with themselves in the first film.
• After Missy divorces Bill's father and marries Ted's, Bill can't think of anything to say, so he just repeats his Running Gag "Shut up, Ted" line from the first movie.
• Bill calls the evil robots dickweeds for killing them, referencing when Bill called a knight a "medieval dickweed" for apparently killing Ted.
• When Bill and Ted try to plead for their lives and tell the evil robots that they love them, the robots call them "fags," a callback to the first film, when Bill and Ted embrace, then call each other "fag."
• The boys again quote metal lyrics when asked to say something profound.
• When the camera pans down from the Builder's Emporium sign, you can see a sign further down for Oshman's Sporting Goods- the store that Genghis Khan "totally ravaged" at the mall in the first movie.
• The climax is again resolved by planning to go back in time to set things up after the climax is resolved.
• The Cameo : A number of musicians have cameos, including the members of Primus as themselves, "Big" Jim Martin of Faith No More playing himself Etc.  referred to as "Sir James Martin of the Faith No More Spiritual and Theological centre" , and bluesman Taj Mahal as heaven's gatekeeper.
• Celebrities Hang Out in Heaven : When Bill, Ted, and Death go to heaven to meet the universe's greatest inventor, they find Confucius , Benjamin Franklin , Albert Einstein , and George Washington playing charades with Station. Someone can also be heard asking " Marilyn " how she got into show business.
• Chess with Death : Parodied by having Bill and Ted best Death in a number of modern party and board games until he finally admits defeat.
• Confusing Multiple Negatives : When made to believe that the princesses have broken up with them, Bill describes the situation as "non-non-heinous", i.e., heinous. He later calls his personal hell "non-non-non-non-heinous" which, yes, still adds up to heinous.
• Counter Zany : "How do we defeat evil robot usses?" "By building good robot usses to fight them!"
• Covers Always Lie : Parodied when Bill and Ted complain that rock albums inaccurately portrayed Hell. "We got totally lied to by our album covers, man."
• Creation Sequence : Station assembles the Good Robot Usses in the back of a moving van.
• The credits describe the crew as "awesome", "bodacious", etc.
• Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon appear as the two male members of the seance.
• Director Peter Hewitt appears as the smoker at the hardware shop whom Death talks to.
• Crystal Spires and Togas : Subverted, as we learn that not everyone is happy to live in a future founded by a pair of hard rockers.
• Curb-Stomp Battle : The "Good Robot Usses" created by Station own the "Bad Robot Usses" created by Chuck De Nomolos. They uppercut their heads off their bodies, and a follow-up punch to the torso causes them to explode. Surprisingly the Bad Robot Usses are perfectly ok with this. Evil Ted: Dude, we may have met our match! Evil Bill: Kudos to you, good human usses!
• Darker and Edgier : As is evident by the titles. Whilst Excellent Adventure is a feel-good romp, Bogus Journey has the title characters a) facing robot terrorists from the future and b) dying and going to hell , even if it is still played for laughs and they get better eventually.
• Death Is Gray : After Bill and Ted are thrown off a cliff by their evil robot twins, they appear as ghosts with gray skin.
• Defeat Means Friendship : After having lost every game to Bill and Ted, Death becomes their ally who also has to obey their orders.
• Despite having a number of lines in the first film, Bill's dad only has a single reaction shot in which he looks forlornly at Missy.
• Ted's little brother Deacon had a substantial sideplot in the first film, but never shows up in the sequel. He's acknowledged only in Ted's personal Hell, when Ted steals an Easter basket with Deacon's name on it.
• Bill & Ted in between the time they die and go to Hell. At times you can tell they're just wearing grey paint and greyscale versions of their clothing.
• Also with Colonel Oats in hell.
• It turns out that Death is actually a pretty nice guy once you get to know him, and the climax of the movie has him joining Bill and Ted's band.
• Bill and Ted also have a rather casual conversation with God just before returning to the living world.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu? : When Bill & Ted are cast into an underground maze of doors containing their worst fears by the Devil, Ted is unimpressed by the big guy's taunts... The Devil: Choose your eternity! (evil laugh) Dead Ted: Choose your own, you FAG !! The Devil: (angry roar) (Ted is sent flying into a wall)
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu? : "I can't believe we Melvined Death!" (high five)
• Do Not Adjust Your Set : De Nomolos commandeers the world's televisions to deliver his evil speech.
• Don't Fear the Reaper : Bad attitude? Yes! Evil? No! Combines with Waxing Lyrical after the two beat Death and he has to lead them to Heaven. Dead Bill: Hey, Ted — Don't Fear the Reaper ! Death: I heard that!
• Drill Sergeant Nasty : Colonel Oats, the head and namesake of Oats Military Academy where Ted's dad is threatening to send him in the first movie. He's only mentioned in the first film; we first meet him in the sequel at a party and he's still offering a place for Ted at the academy . However, when the duo goes to hell, the first punishment they go through is being at military school where he's this trope in full force and demands that they "get down and give me infinity". Then again, they are in HELL...
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe : Mocked when Bill and Ted ask God for help in protecting their girlfriends, and are sent to meet the smartest man in the universe... who turns out to be two squat, large-nosed Martians. Or one big one, depending... Death: Did you assume that the most brilliant scientist in the entire universe would be from Earth ?
• Embarrassing First Name : At the end of the film, De Nomolos' first name is revealed as "Chuck". Which isn't really that bad a name, unless you're trying to be an Evil Overlord .
• Evil Knockoff : The duo's evil robot duplicates from the future.
• Evil Mentor : Subverted with De Nomolos, although the viewers are meant to think he was this to Rufus for most of the film. Rufus calls him "my old teacher" in the opening scene and the villain responds by calling him "my favorite pupil." Rufus later explains at the end of the film that De Nomolos was actually his old gym teacher.
• Evil Wears Black : De Nomolos and his soldiers all wear black.
• Exact Words : Just before using the Good Robot Usses to destroy the Evil Robot Usses, the real Bill & Ted say to the ERU's "Catch YOU later Bill and Ted!" The GRU's knock the ERU's heads off, and Bill and Ted catch them a few moments later.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials : Station. He even provides the page image. His nudity gets Lampshaded when the boys comment on his butt.
• Faint in Shock : The princesses reaction when Evil Bill & Ted reveal that they're robots.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional : Rufus introduces some guest speakers from the past to his students: Johann Sebastian Bach , Jim Martin and Ria Paschelle, a woman from the 23rd century who invented the statiophonicoxygeneticamplifiagraphiphonideliverberator.
• Fantastic Time Management : How Bill and Ted actually end up learning to play.
• Field Trip to the Past : Literally, after introducing guest speakers from the past, Rufus reminds the class about an upcoming field trip to Babylonia.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell : This is how hell appears when they first arrive: breaking rocks eternally under the watchful eye of Satan , as well as a chamber filled with many forms of Ironic Hell .
• Flowery Insults : Colonel Oats throws some fairly bizarre ones at them in hell. "You petty, base, bully-bullocked bugger billies!" "You're not strong, you're silky boys! Silk comes from the butts of Chinese worms." "I'll eat you up like the warm, toasty little buttercakes you are!" "You two-toed, no-nosed salamanders!"
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven : Well, more "Plastic Fluorescent-Backlit Clouds" Heaven, which the duo describe as "most atypical".
• Freeze-Frame Bonus : Some of the magazines and newspapers that appear detailing Would Stallyns' career in the credits are dated 2691. Maybe they get reprinted in the future.
• From Nobody to Nightmare : De Nomolos apparently went from a gym teacher to a terrorist leader and would-be world-conqueror, who planned to alter history so that the future would match his own - likely dystopian - political structure. A pretty big jump.
• At the Builder's Emporium, Death tells a smoker "See you real soon". After he passes by, you can see the smoker (played by the director) do a Double Take and quickly stub out his cigarette.
• The bizarre costumes of the people in heaven are often jokes in themselves, including one man who walks around heaven in a boxing outfit.
• Fusion Dance : The Stations can body-slam each other to form a larger, muscular STATION.
• Future Me Scares Me : Sort of. The duo quickly become afraid of what they think are their future selves, before it's revealed that they're actually evil robot doubles.
• Future Slang : "Station" is used as both a greeting and a positive adjective (in the fashion of "awesome"). Though at the concert at the end of the film, Ted says it can mean anything.
• God : Appears as a bright light in a roughly anthropoid shape who says very little.
• God Is Good : When Bill and Ted ask for help, he directs them to Station without question, even after they admit to mugging three people who had just ascended to heaven for their clothes.
• Graceful Loser : Evil Bill and Evil Ted of all people, when the Good Robot Usses charge them in the climactic concert. Not only do they congratulate the originals, but they seemingly concede defeat by tilting their heads back to give the Good Robots a better target. Evil Ted: Dude, we may have met our match! Evil Bill: Kudos to you, good human usses! Evil Bill and Evil Ted: Catch you later, Bill and Ted!! Bill and Ted: Catch you later, Bill and Ted!! (Good Robot Usses punch heads off Evil Robot Usses)
• The Grim Reaper : Starts off as a minor antagonist, but soon joins the guys. Later wins the Indy 500 on foot and gets caught in a lip-syncing scandal .
• Groin Attack : Variant: Bill and Ted use a Melvin, a front-side wedgie, on The Grim Reaper . Later the Reaper does it to De Nomolos.
• Happily Ever After : The end credits of the film feature a montage of newspaper headlines chronicling Bill & Ted's rise to fame and their music bringing about world peace and a new scientific renaissance while playing the song "God Gave Rock And Roll To You" by KISS . It's a very happy ending.
• In the future, Rufus brings Johann Sebastian Bach to his class.
• In heaven, there are various historical personages, including Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.
• Hollywood Board Games : Death is such a Sore Loser that he keeps asking the boys for rematches and when that doesn't work, asks to play another board game. They go from Cluedo to Battleship to Twister .
• Homage : The second movie parodies the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal where a Knight plays chess with the Grim Reaper for his soul. Bill and Ted play him with classic board games and Twister.
• Homemade Inventions : The Good Robot Usses.
• How Many Fingers? : Parodied when Ted asks his evil robot how many fingers he's about to hold up. When the robot announces "three," Ted indeed holds up three fingers. The comedy is whether Ted only held up three fingers because the robot said so.

• Bill and Ted's long fall to Hell, which takes so long they begin playing "20 Questions" to pass the time. To be fair, it was a pretty short game: Dead Bill: Hey, you wanna play Twenty Questions? Dead Ted: Okay! I got one! Dead Bill: Are you a mineral? Dead Ted: Yeah! Dead Bill: Are you a tank? Dead Ted: Whoa! Yeah!
• When this film airs on television, a commercial break is often placed in the middle of this scene, which probably makes the whole gag funnier .
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff Dead Bill: Ted. Dead Ted: Yeah? Dead Bill: If I die, you can have my Megadeth collection. Dead Ted: But, dude, we're already dead. Dead Bill: Oh. Well then they're yours, dude!
• Ironic Echo : "Catch ya later, Bill and Ted!" First by the Evil Robots to Bill and Ted, then by Bill and Ted to the Evil Robots. Both times, the party spoken to is about to die.
• Ironic Hell : Both boys experience this after passing through Fire and Brimstone Hell for a bit.
• It's Been Done : The plot is a blend of Terminator and, of all things, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park - which featured KISS battling Evil Robot KISS. Seriously.
• Kick the Dog : Evil Bill and Ted repeatedly try to kill animals. The Evil Robots' groping of the heroes' (rather chaste) princess girlfriends also counts in various ways.
• Kill and Replace : Evil Robot Bill & Ted are programmed to murder the originals, wreck their relationships, and ruin their performance at the battle of the bands. They even succeed, up to a point .
• Kirk's Rock : Lampshaded: Just before the boys meet the Evil Robots, they're watching that particular episode of Star Trek on TV. When the Evil Usses drag the boys up to the rock to kill them, we even get a recreation of the dramatic zoom out from Trek .
• Knight of Cerebus : The humor tones down a bit whenever De Nomolos appears. He's very straightforward and serious, though he ends up being not much of a threat in the end.
• Larynx Dissonance : Evil Bill changes his voice to one of the medieval babes to give Bill and Ted a fake breakup call, in order to lead them into the trap where they will be killed.
• LOL, 69 : Bill & Ted have crossed out the number on their apartment door and spray-painted a large "69" next to it.
• Losing Your Head : The Evil Usses' version of basketball. They end up losing their heads for good thanks to the Good Robot Usses.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right : Chuck De Nomolos' motive.
• Manly Facial Hair : Bill develops a beard during his and Ted's 16 months of training as a way of showing how much they have toughened up, although the newspaper photos indicate he shaves it off later.
• May–December Romance : Missy and Ted's father, who's even older than Bill's father from the first movie. And then she hooks up with Chuck De Nomolos at the end of that movie. The girl Really Gets Around .
• Meaningful Name : Ms. Wardroe is actually a disguise of Rufus's .
• Men Can't Keep House : Bill and Ted's apartment is a showcase of this trope.
• Mirror Match : The Evil Robot Bill and Ted vs. the Good Robot Usses.
• Monochrome Apparition : When Bill and Ted are dead, they're grayish-blue.
• Mugged for Disguise : Bill and Ted do this to people in heaven!
• Ted mentions the princesses are celebrating their fifth year in the 20th century. They arrived in the first movie which was set in 1988 so Bogus Journey must be set in 1993 when it was released in 1991.
• The Great Leader's comment in Bill & Ted Face the Music about the concert happening 25 years ago would put Bogus Journey as happening in 1995.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain : Ties in with the Stable Time Loop . Chuck De Nomolos decides to broadcast his defeat of Bill and Ted live to the world. After he's defeated, this only ensures that Bill and Ted broadcast their first performance live all over the world, hence beginning the cycle of their music creating the future Utopia .
• Obvious Stunt Double : At one point in Bill and Ted's apartment, Alex Winter steps off his mark and reveals the face of Keanu Reeves ' body double.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You : Rufus mentions to the protagonists that De Nomolos was the sit-up champion of the 27th Century. At least that seems to be a compliment, it might have been meant as a goofy version of How the Mighty Have Fallen .
• Orifice Invasion : Played for Laughs when Bill and Ted's ghosts try possessing two men. They squeeze in through the ears. "I totally possessed my dad!"
• Overly Long Gag : When they get sent to hell. "Dude, this is a totally deep hole."
• Overly Long Scream : Bill and Ted fall down a pit to hell, screaming the whole way, but the pit is so deep that they eventually get tired of repeatedly screaming and start playing 20 Questions.
• Our Founder : Bill and Ted, in the future.
• Out-Gambitted : The climax of the film. Both sides' plans rely on the premise that they won the current battle in the present, which would allow them to manipulate time afterwards and rig the battle in the present to their favor. "The future belongs to the winner."
• Outside-Context Problem : No one, least of all Bill and Ted themselves, saw evil duplicates of themselves coming back to kill them, under orders from an attempted revolutionary with plans to turn the future Earth into a dystopia . But in turn, Evil B&T and De Nomolos likely didn't forsee B&T allying with the Grim Reaper and a duo of Martians to stop them, and constructing good robotic duplicates to defeat the evil ones.
• Perfect Pacifist People : Bill and Ted's future society appears to be one of these.
• Pokémon Speak : The Stations use the word "Station" for everything.
• The Power of Rock : Exaggerated, as the effects of Wyld Stallyns' music are shown via a newspaper montage at the end of the film (set to KISS 's "God Gave Rock 'n Roll To You"): Wyld Stallyns Tour Midwest; Crop Growth Up 30% Bill & Ted Tour Mideast; Peace Achieved Stallyns Use World Nuclear Arsenal to Fuel Amplifiers Air Guitar Found to Eliminate Smog Bill & Ted Named Sportsmen of the Decade Rumored W.S. Split; DOW Drops 600 Points W.S. Split A Hoax - DOW To Record High Bill and Ted: The Movie Wyld Stallyns to Play Mars - "Station!"
• The patio table at the princesses' birthday is littered with Pepsi cans. They also hold Pepsi cans in the previous scene.
• An Establishing Shot lingers on the Builder's Emporium sign to make sure you know exactly which hardware store Bill and Ted frequent. Sadly, Builder's Emporium folded two years after the film released.
• Profound by Pop Song : Bill, Ted and Death try and get into Heaven and are asked to answer what the meaning of life is for entry. They answer by quoting "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison and it works!
• Really Gets Around : Missy was married to Bill's dad in the first film, but has left him and married Ted's dad by the sequel. She also flirts with Col. Oats, and the end credits reveal that she has left Ted's dad for Chuck De Nomolos.
• Retroactive Preparation : B&T manage to turn this trope into a martial art during the showdown with De Nomolos.
• Ridiculously Human Robots : The Evil Robot Bill and Ted, who can apparently get "full-on robot chubb[ies]" from looking at a picture of the guys' girlfriends.
• Robotic Reveal : Bill punching his robotic evil twin. "Oww! You're metal, dude!"
• Robot Me : There are Bill and Ted's evil robot copies from the future, and then Station improvises another robot Bill and Ted to counter them.
• Rule of Funny : The movie runs on this. Bill growing a ZZ Top beard in 16 months is the least implausible joke in the film.
• San Dimas Time : Interestingly, the sequel seems to throw this out by allowing Bill and Ted to spend 16 months to get guitar lessons, then return to the present to win the concert. One might assume that they have to jump 16 months into the future after they win the concert, but the news articles that display over the credits don't suggest that they vanished for 16 months after their first performance.
• Sdrawkcab Name : Chuck De Nomolos is this for writer Ed Solomon.
• Sdrawkcab Speech : Additionally, the exorcism chant is "Ed and Chris [Matheson, Solomon's co-writer] will rule the world", spoken backwards: D'lrow eht elur l'liw sirhc d'na de.
• The Death subplot is a direct parody of Death from The Seventh Seal .
• Bill and Ted watch the "Arena" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series , featuring Kirk's Rock . They are then taken to Kirk's Rock to be killed by the evil robots.
• Ted possesses his father, "Like from The Exorcist 1 and 3."
• The boys quote Poison 's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" when asked the meaning of life.
• Les Claypool of Primus wears a The Residents shirt onstage.
• Station is playing charades and miming the film Smokey and the Bandit 3 . Death guesses " Butch and Sundance: The Early Years ."
• Bill's waist-length beard in the very end is obviously a nod to ZZ Top .
• Something That Begins with "Boring" : Bill and Ted play 20 Questions while falling into Hell and waiting to land.
• Sore Loser : The Grim Reaper when he initially loses. It take several losses to the boys for him to finally give in to their demands.
• Spinning Paper : Seen during the end credits.
• Squick : An in-universe example: Death gets jealous of all the praise Station is getting and starts fishing for compliments. When Ted says Station has "an excellently huge Martian butt", Death says, "Don't overlook my butt. I work out all the time. Reaping burns a lot of calories." Bill and Ted visibly shudder at this.
• Stable Time Loop : Chuck De Nomolos is basically responsible for Wyld Stallyns' world fame, broadcasting their Battle of the Bands appearance to the world by accident in his attempt to Take Over the World . Also used tactically in the fight.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien : Station, despite his (their?) goofy appearance.
• Tagline : "Once... They Made history. Now... They Are History."
• Technology Porn : Station's assembly of the Good Robot Usses is a Homemade Inventions version of this trope.
• Throw the Dog a Bone : Despite his Butt-Monkey status, Death finds himself enjoying the company of Bill and Ted and being part of the band. Given that much of his grim nature appears to cover up severe insecurity and loneliness, Bill and Ted are probably the first friends he'd ever had. Also, it's shown during the news montage that he managed to win the Indianapolis 500 on foot . His response? " I didn't know I could run that fast ."
• Time-Passage Beard : Bill and Ted have beards after returning from a 16-month guitar training sabbatical. Bill somehow managed to grow a ZZ Top beard in that time .
• To Hell and Back
• Took a Level in Badass : At the end of the movie, Bill and Ted use the time machine to take 16 months of intensive guitar training, going from being bad on a horrendous level to astonishingly good. Not to mention using and exploiting the Retroactive Preparation trope to its' fullest extent to stop De Nomolos.
• Treacherous Advisor : Parodied. Early on, Chuck De Nomolos is recognized by Rufus and calls him his old teacher. Turns out, he was a gym teacher.
• Trust Password : Double subverted; when the heroes' Evil Twins arrive, Ted is suspicious, but Bill convinces him to trust them. Then Ted trusts his robot counterpart after it passes a How Many Fingers? test.
• Unfolding Plan Montage : The main characters face off against the Big Bad , each telling their plans and how they enacted them, resulting in weirdness out-of-flashback as Bill, Ted, and De Nomolos, all have time travel devices.
• Unnaturally Blue Lighting : Bill and Ted are treated to this when they wake up in the afterlife, and later when they're in Death's chamber playing his games.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight : Nobody seems to find it odd when Station and the Grim Reaper are wandering through Builder's Emporium.
• Uranus Is Showing : Bill and Ted say they admire Uranus when complimenting God , then chuckle.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show : Even in a Darker and Edgier movie played for laughs, De Nomolos is far more evil than something you'd expect from it. (He has a little humor potential, but it's all Black Humor .)
• Visual Pun : Bill and Ted echo back "Catch ya later, Bill and Ted!" to the Evil Robot Usses... and a few seconds later, do in fact catch the robots' flying heads.
• Wedgie : The characters give The Grim Reaper one.
• The Whole World Is Watching : The villain De Nomolos causes all the world's channels to watch his New Era Speech , but Bill and Ted are able to defeat him and then their future selves play their music for all the world to see, which makes them internationally famous. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? : Averted in the comic and novel adaptation. Rather than the Xanatos Speed Chess battle with DeNomolos, the boys simply find the Self-Destruct Mechanism in Evil Robot B&T's heads and throw them to DeNomolos , killing him.
• The Next Sunday A.D. example above implies the movie is set in 1993. The newspaper and magazine articles that appear over the credits are mostly dated as the year of release, 1991. Some are dated 2691 but they're presumably future reprints.
• To make it more confusing, in Bill & Ted Face the Music (released and set in 2020) has the Great Leader saying the concert happened 25 years ago. Implying that Bogus Journey takes place in 1995.
• Xanatos Speed Chess : The final confrontation between Bill and Ted and DeNomolos.
• You Already Changed the Past : The entire climax is Bill, Ted, and Chuck De Nomolos performing dueling versions of this. Except that, as Bill points out, only the winner can change history, so all the things the villain thought he planted were just decoys B&T placed to lull him into a false sense of security .

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Review by Tim Brayton Pro

Bill & ted's bogus journey 1991 ★★★½.

Rewatched Aug 23 , 2020

Tim Brayton’s review published on Letterboxd:

The most ambitious kind of sequel, one that does basically everything different, except insofar as the central characters provide a unified tone and cheerful attitude with the original. This is a far more uneven film than Excellent Adventure , dragging badly during its set-up phase and finding the filmmakers a bit unsure of what they're doing with all this expanded budget and scale; but then it swings around to extraordinary heights like William Sadler's peevish Grim Reaper, the best thing in either movie by a considerable distance, or the surprisingly clever way color is used to give us more knowledge than the persistently dopey heroes. Probably a bit more to my tastes than the first film in its reference points and genre elements, though if you wanted to argue that it suffers from having less heart and warmth, I'd be forced to agree.

( Full review at Alternate Ending )

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The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review

Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Rating: ★★.

Director – Peter Hewitt, Screenplay – Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon, Producer – Scott Kroopf, Photography – Oliver Wood, Music – David Newman, Visual Effects Supervisors – Gregory L. McMurray & Richard Yuricich, Makeup Effects – Kevin Yagher, Production Design – David L. Snyder. Production Company – Interscope Communications..

Alexander Winter (Bill S. Preston Esq/Granny Preston), Keanu Reeves (Ted Theodore Logan), William Sadler (Grim Reaper), Joss Ackland (Chuck De Nomolous), Annette Azcuy & Sarah Trigger (Princesses), Hal Landon Jr (Captain Logan), Amy Stock-Poynton (Missy), George Carlin (Rufus), Pam Grier (Miss Woodrow), Roy Brocksmith (Mr Preston)

The warlord De Nomolous, tired of life in a future ruled by the Bill and Ted philosophy, creates two android duplicates of Bill and Ted. He sends these back in time to the present where they throw Bill and Ted off a cliff to their deaths. As disembodied spirits, Bill and Ted travel through the afterlife, journeying to both Heaven and Hell. There they encounter Death and challenge him to a series of board games in order to obtain his help in getting back home.

This is a sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), which proved a reasonable hit with its idiosyncratic and appealingly offbeat sense of humour. It was one of those sleeper hits that took off in ways that nobody expected. Not to mention that it propelled co-star Keanu Reeves on his subsequent path to A-list stardom.

As is usually the wont with sequels, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey offers much the same as last time – and in an often entertaining package. However, the very act of repetition also lacks the unique one-offness and the lightness of step that came in the hip nonsensical wit of the original. Director Peter Hewitt lingers on the all the ‘exxx-cellent’s and the guitar riff pantomimes too long and often (although there are some amusing variations on the latter – when Ted’s father conducts a trill, it comes out as an acoustic guitar chord, while Death’s is accompanied by a Gothic organ) and the joke wearies through over-emphasis.

Most noticeably, the gags have been scaled up from an economy to an A-size budget. Like the game of Battleships with Death at a giant table, this leaves them echoing amid the cavernous oversized sets and the top-notch but superfluous effects. Heaven, for example, is an impressive set with some well-done creature effects but all there is to look at is the sets – there is no particular gag going on inside them.

Much of the film is just there for you to look at and the first film’s slacker/stoner humour is left wandering. The first film’s charm was all in its humour; it did not need, nor did it have, big-budget effects and razzle-dazzle. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey fatally mis-scales the film into something oversized. Even a chase sequence through Bill and Ted’s private Hells adds nothing (although has enough sentiment-bashing amusement to suggest that their Hells will be embodied by fluffy toys and a halitotic Granny wanting a kiss).

Still Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey has its small successes. The best aspect is William Sadler as a slightly disgruntled Grim Reaper, played with the accent and wry mannerisms with which they used to characterise Jewish immigrants. The character is an amusing send-up of the personified Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) (although one suspects that Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon stole more than a little from Terry Pratchett). Bergman crafted the archetypal image of a chess-playing Death but this film’s amusing spin is to have Death challenging souls to games of Battleships, Cluedo and Twister; or throwing in wittily incongruous images like seeing Death outfitted in a Bo Peep costume and contemplating turning in his scythe for a hoe at a hardware store. The montage ending also does an amusing and credible job of suggesting how the Bill and Ted philosophy could end up conquering the world.

29 years after this, a third film was made, reuniting Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and William Sadler, with Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). The two characters were subsequently spun out in the animated tv series Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures (1990) and awful live-action tv series Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures (1992) where Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter were replaced respectively by Christopher Kennedy and Evan Richards.

British director Peter (sometimes Pete) Hewitt stayed with genre material through his next several films:– the adaptation of Mary Norton’s little people adventures The Borrowers (1997); Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? (1999), a coming of age comedy about a teen whose father has psychic powers; Thunderpants (2002) about a kid who launches a NASA mission using his farts; Garfield (2004), a live-action adaptation of the popular syndicated comic-strip; the superhero film Zoom: Academy for Superheroes (2006); and Mostly Ghostly: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? (2014). Hewitt is also credited with the story for Thunderbirds (2004).

Trailer here

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Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey Blu-ray Review: A Delightfully Goofy Sequel

The 26th Century utopia based on the music of Wyld Stallyns is threatened when Rufus’s (George Carlin) former teacher, the villainous De Nomolos (Joss Ackland), sends look-alike robots back to the past to kill Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) after the events of their Excellent Adventure , and alter the future.

Rather than simply repeating the story from the original film, returning screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon offer audiences something different with this sequel. Instead of more time-traveling silliness, Bill and Ted have a metaphysical adventure as the robots are successful in killing them early on. The robots disrupt our heroes’ lives while their souls are left to try and save the day with help from Death (William Sadler), whom they initially escape by giving him a “melvin” and defeating him at a game in a nod to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal . And because that’s not weird enough, there are martians.

After unsuccessfully trying to communicate with Ted’s dad (Hal Landon Jr. in a hysterical scene where he acts and speaks like Ted), Missy (Amy Stock-Poynton), who is now Bill’s ex-step mom and Ted’s current step mom, sends them to Hell during a séance. Getting equal time, they also go to Heaven, before returning to San Dimas to battle their counterparts and other bands. (Keep an eye out for a quick cameo by Primus.) How the timeline proceeds is very funny and plays out during the closing credits.

Previously available from Shout Factory in Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Collection , the sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is now a stand-alone release in a limited edition steelbook.

The video has a 1080p/MPEG-4 AVC encoded transfer are displayed at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The colors are strong, from natural hues to bright day-go neon costumes of the future that pop off the screen. Blacks are inky and whites are bright, contributing to a strong contrast. Fine texture details can be seen on objects.

Film grain and occasional dirt are evident. Also evident is the artificialness of some of the CGI effects. The audio is available in DTS-HD MA 5.1. Dialogue is clear. Effects are well placed around the soundscape. David Newman’s score also fills the speakers as do the rock sounds on the soundtrack. The track has a good dynamic range, and the bass supports the music and effects well.

Bonus features from 2016 include

• Audio Commentary with actor Alex Winter and producer Scott Kroopf
• Audio Commentary with writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon
• “Bill & Ted Go To Hell (HD, 52 min) – Revisiting A Bogus Journey” actors Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and William Sadler; producer Scott Kroopf; production designer David L. Snyder; composer David Newman; and others discuss the making of the film.
• Theatrical Trailer

Bogus Journey is a delightfully goofy comedy that succeeds in large part because of the two lead performers, who infuse a sweet charm at the core of their dim-witted characters. Fans should be delighted to see the boys back for another adventure, but if one didn’t like their first outing, not sure this sequel will be any more appealing. The Shout Factory Blu-ray delivers a pleasing high-def experience that makes this journey worth taking.

Gordon S. Miller

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How ‘Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey’ Became a Most Excellent Sequel

Since the beginning of time, or at least 1991, there's been a debate stirring among movie fans: Is Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey better than the original Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ? The answer, followed by a celebratory air-guitar riff, is a resounding yes.

The sequel was released three years after   Bill and Ted's first excellent adventure, and it surpasses its predecessor in almost every way. The story is better, the direction is more accomplished and it includes a far more bodacious collection of gags, special appearances, film homages and early '90s pop culture references.

The story takes place two years after the original. Since the events of the first movie, Bill ( Alex Winter ) and Ted ( Keanu Reeves ) have graduated from high school and are working at a place called Pretzel & Cheese. They're trying to get up the nerve to propose to their girlfriends, while also getting ready for what they hope will be a victory for their group Wyld Stallyns in an upcoming battle of the bands. But their plans are threatened by a former gym teacher and sit-up-champion-turned-evil-mastermind-from-the-future Chuck De Nomolos (played by Joss Ackland, memorable for his turn as the malevolent Arjen Rudd in Lethal Weapon II ).

To defeat Bill and Ted, De Nomolos sends a pair of evil Bill and Ted robots – who look identical to the real thing – back in time (an obvious riff on 1984's The Terminator ) . The robots accomplish this by throwing the boys off the Vasquez Rocks outcropping outside of Los Angeles, famous as the setting of the 1967 "Arena" episode of Star Trek , in which Captain Kirk defeats the reptilian Gorn. (Bill and Ted watch this episode earlier in the movie.)

Now dead, Bill and Ted encounter the Grim Reaper (William Sadler, memorable for his role as Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption ). After a brief sojourn in hell, which includes riffs on everything from the 1921 German expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Clive Barker's 1987 Hellraiser, Bill and Ted challenge Death to a contest. It's a play on Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal , but instead of chess, the contest consists of Battleship, Clue, Electric Football and Twister. After his defeat, Death becomes Bill and Ted's partner, and eventually ends up playing bass in their band.

To defeat the evil robot versions of themselves, Bill and Ted decide they need divine help, so they get Death to take them to heaven. At the pearly gates, they encounter the Gatekeeper, played by blues artist Taj Mahal, and quote lyrics from Poison 's 1988 hit "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," winning their way into heaven. They meet an alien there named Station, who's playing charades with Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein.

Station helps Bill and Ted build good robot versions of themselves, which they take to the battle of the bands to defeat the evil robots. After a final encounter with De Nomolos, they win the battle of the bands by playing a rendition of Kiss ' "God Gave Rock 'N' Roll to You II" (with added guitar work by Steve Vai ), during which Bill is dressed up like a member of ZZ Top and Ted is dressed like Vai himself. The band they defeat is Primus; the MC of the event is played by Pam Grier (memorable for her role in Quentin Tarantino 's 1997 Jackie Brown , which in turn referenced her storied '70s blaxploitation career). At the end of the movie, Grier unzips herself to reveal that she's actually George Carlin – reprising his character Rufus from the Bill and Ted film – who has been helping the boys all along.

Watch 'Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey' Trailer

As if all this isn't enough,  Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey includes an appearance by Faith No More guitarist Jim Martin, references to The Exorcist , a gag in which Bill's stepmom has divorced his dad and married Ted's dad, scenes taking place at the same mall where the DeLorean-tracks-of-fire scene from Back to the Future was shot and a sequence filmed at the Tillman water reclamation plant in Van Nuys, which has served as the setting for the Starfleet Academy in various Star Trek spin-offs.

It also features one of the all-time greatest onscreen impersonations of Reeves, performed by Hal Landon Jr. as Ted's father in a scene where he's possessed by Ted's ghost. Landon gets everything about Reeves right - from the way he holds his head pulled back from his shoulder to the elbows-in-hands-out way he holds his arms. Like so much of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey , the performance serves as a parody inside a parody of a parody, and works because of its entertainment value and self-deprecation.

In the end, it's not only this awareness of its own ridiculousness that makes the movie so charming; it's also the ability with which it's made. While it features almost none of the time-travel and historical-figure shenanigans of the original, the sheer volume of silly references, director Pete Hewitt's visual and storytelling talents and the full commitment of the cast make up for this absence. In retrospect, it's clear that while Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure may have invented the characters and conceit,  Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey perfected it.

Everything We Know About 'Bill and Ted Face the Music'

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