Retrospective Film Review

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) • 30 Years Later

A tyrant from the future creates evil android doubles of Bill and Ted and sends them back to eliminate the originals.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1988) was an unexpected hit (grossing $40M from a $6.5M budget) and kept growing in popularity thanks to its home video afterlife. A sequel was all but guaranteed, with initial ideas revolving around best-friends Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan (Keanu Reeves) having to now pass their English exam, resulting in an adventure where they somehow enter famous stories like Romeo & Juliet and Tom Sawyer. It’s hard to imagine how to make that idea work, so luckily writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon instead settled on a premise best summarised by its working title: Bill & Ted Go to Hell.

Excellent Adventure’s director, Stephen Herek, didn’t want to return for a sequel, claiming the screenplay was “almost a parody of a movie that was already a parody”, so filmmaker Peter Hewitt was hired on the strength of his short film The Candy Show (1989). It was a…