Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter star in this classic eighties movie. Whoa!

Rating: 9/10 (23 April 2005)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin Ahhh, what a classic slice of the eighties. Really, cheesy eighties movies don't get any better than this in my opinion. And cheesy this one is. Amazingly so.
So, basically, here's the story. Bill (Winter) and Ted (Reeves) are a couple of guys who have the combined intelligence of a jar of peanut butter. They aspire to start a band called Wyld Styllyns despite the fact that they don't even possess the knowledge of how to play their guitars. They talk like a couple of surfers from the late eighties, using intelligent words like "heinous," "bodacious," "excellent," "bogus," and so on. It can get a little bit annoying, but it's not like people didn't use to talk like that (scary, isn't it?).
The tagline of the movie is "History is about to be re-written by two guys who can't even spell." That hits the nail pretty much right on the head. Theoretically, in the future, the music that Bill and Ted make will bring about a time of galactic peace. It unites the planets and so on and so forth, blah blah blah. But the problem is, the band will never be started if they fail their history class. Because if they fail history, they fail high school, and Ted's dad will send him off to military school in Alaska.
Obviously this can't happen, so a man from the future, Rufus (Carlin), is sent back in time to aid Bill and Ted with their final history project. If they get an A+ on that project, then they will pass the class, they pass high school, and the band will be started.
So how are they going to pass this history assignment? Simple. Use a time traveling phone booth that Rufus brought with him, kidnap a ton of historical figures and put them all in a big presentation.
So the airhead dudes travel through time and kidnap Billy the Kid, Socrates (pronounced so-cratesÂ…), Sigmund Freud, Joan of Arc, Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, and Ludwig Von Beethoven (pronounced bee-thuv-en).
It really is a weak plot, but it's so imaginative and original and ludicrous that it makes the movie worth watching. Plus the high energy horrible acting of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter make it truly hilarious. It's a great flick.
The funny thing is, I think the only thing that's changed about Keanu from then to now is that he has shorter hair now. Man still can't act.
Bottom Line: 3.5 out of 4 (give it a watch)