You've got to admire a sequel that goes in a completely different direction than the original. You could just rehash the first film, as so many do, but to actually try something new is admirable. Such is the case with Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey.
It's three years after their excellent adventure. Wyld Stallyns really hasn't progressed much as a band, but somehow, they're in a massive Battle of the Bands coming up. Meanwhile, in the future, the villain De Nomolos comes up with an evil plan: he saw Terminator too many times, and decided to send evil robot versions of Bill and Ted back in time to take the place of Bill and Ted. Thus, the future can be molded to his twisted world view! The evil robot Bill and Ted are successful. And now for this journey, Bill and Ted are traveling across Heaven and Hell to get back to the land of the living and defeat their evil robot doppelgangers.
The first thing you notice right away is this sequel is bigger. In the first film, the visions of the future where just some grand cavern. This time out, it's very Back to the Future Part II, flavoured, with bright day-glow colours. The first film had a classic, 1980s, low-budget synthesizer score. This time out, the score is fully orchestral. A lot more money was spent on this sequel, and it shows.
And while the first film had its myriad of historical characters, we get some fun new characters as well. William Sadler is a delight as Death, who winds up being Bill and Ted's unwilling sidekick across the afterlife. It's William Sadler. He last film role immediately before this was as the bad guy in Die Hard 2. I'm not sure if this was the first time he did an outright comedy, but he is hilarious in it, as he moves from unwilling participant to the bass player in Wyld Stallyns.
We gets lots of animatronics as well, with a gigantic, demonic Satan when they wind up in Hell. They're eventually joined by the smartest person in the universe, an alien named Station, who helps them build good robots to defeat the evil robots. All Station can say is "station," which really adds a large degree of surrealness to the film.
Perhaps one of my favourite bits is when Bill and Ted die. They're watching a Star Trek rerun earlier, and they're killed at the location where the Star Trek episode took place, and so they match the camera shots and the music exactly. Quite the in-joke, especially since they took the time to set it up.
Bogus Journey could have easily played it safe, and the duo do more time traveling and meet more historical characters, but they have to be admired for do something so completely unexpected. And it completely pays off and makes another wonderful, goofy, funny film.
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