Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

The Seventh Seal, replayed on a Twister mat

The working title was Bill & Ted Go to Hell, and Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon meant it plainly. Robot duplicates, sent back from 2691 by a gym teacher turned terrorist named Chuck De Nomolos, throw the originals off a cliff. Everything that follows happens to two dead men.

Peter Hewitt directed it, his first feature: he had left film school with a short that won a BAFTA, and that short got him an agent in Hollywood. William Sadler wanted Death after years of serious villains, taped his audition in an accent borrowed from the Czechoslovak actor Jan Tříska, and turned up aged by the makeup supervisor from Die Hard 2.

The Story

The dead pair meet Death, slip away from him once by a childish trick, then cross Hell before accepting his challenge for their souls. The Seventh Seal set a knight against Death over a chessboard; here the games are Battleship, Clue, Electric Football and Twister. Death loses all four and enters their service.

Two aliens called Station build benevolent robot doubles of the pair, in time for the San Dimas Battle of the Bands. Their name is an editing accident: the writers cut a scene set in a police station and kept the word left stranded in its heading, because it sounded funny in a small Martian voice. The film is a direct sequel to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

The Ideal Audience

Orion released it on 19 July 1991; it cost twenty million dollars and took close to thirty-eight million in the United States. Europe came later: a German video release in October 1992, a French one in June 1993 through Columbia TriStar. Rotten Tomatoes counts fifty-six reviews, fifty-seven percent positive, around a consensus that the same jokes work less well the second time.

Common Sense Media rates it PG and suggests ten and up, flagging profanity, two homophobic slurs and the heroes gawking at a woman while they are ghosts. Start with the first film: this one only makes sense to someone who already knows how Bill and Ted talk.