16 March 2014

Blu-Ray Review - Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure (25th Anniversary Edition)


Genre:
Adventure, Comedy, Sci-fi
Distributor:
StudioCanal UK
BD Release Date:
17th March 2014 (UK)
Rating: 12
Director:
Stephen Herek
Cast:
Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin,
Buy: Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure (25th Anniversary Steelbook Edition) [Blu-ray] [1989]

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure has a special place in my movie loving heart. It was the first film I remember loving as a kid, and I mean really loving. My best friend and I watched it over and over again. I could still probably recite the script from beginning to end with few errors. I developed a Keanu Reeves obsession so ridiculous it makes modern day One Direction and Justin Bieber fans look like a bunch of amateurs. Had social media been around, there would have been no stopping me. To this day I will still watch anything with Keanu Reeves in, no matter how awful.

Disturbing adolescent obsessions aside, Bill & Ted Excellent Adventure is bound to stir up some fond memories. A popular teen comedy when released back in 1989 it did much better than most people expected and went on to even bigger cult status – introducing catchphrases such as ‘be excellent to each other’ and ‘party on dudes’ into the lexicon of the English language. It also, launched the career of Keanu Reeves who went on to star in some of the most popular film of the next 20 years (Point Break, Speed, The Matrix), and well, Alex Winter was in it as well, who has since become a renowned music video director for the likes of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Butt Hole Surfers

Perennial losers Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan, dream about making it famous with their band Wyld Stallyns. The only trouble? They don’t know how to play. In danger of flunking out of high school if they don’t pass their oral history report they’ll be separated as Ted gets packed off to military school. What they don’t know is that their music is destined to change history, bring about world peace and all sorts of other fantastic things. Cue Rufus (Carlin), sent from the future to help the duo pass their history report with the help of a time travelling phone booth in which they collect various historical figures.

Bill & Ted is a film that would never be made today (mainly because you could find most of the information on the internet). It flew in under the radar, with unknowns in the lead roles and put its good-natured heart and soul on the screen for all to see. Sure the special effects were terrible even for 1989. Where else are you going to be able to put Beethoven, Socrates, Joan of Arc and Billy the Kid in a Californian shopping mall with an excellent rock soundtrack?

Followed up in 1991 by a flawed but still funny sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, there have been rumours of a third instalment. Though I would love to see our duo again I’m sceptical, and think I would rather remember them the way they were.

The anniversary edition release has some interesting making of extras but is disappointingly light on interviews with the cast, Reeves and Winter being the most noticeably absent.

That aside, this moment in your history is definitely worth a re-visit.

★★★★½

Vikki Myerscough

1 comment:

  1. I'm shocked that this could get anything less than infinity stars.

    ReplyDelete