STARLOG will go to any lengths for its readers. This time, it went to Hell. And Heaven. Coincidentally, both are located in Valencia, California, or at least they were for the lensing of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, formerly Bill & Ted Go To Hell. Hell, you may be interested to know, consists of big red rocks chained in orbit around a bigger red rock. Heaven is dressed in off-white and pale lavender columns and amphitheaters, resembling a Caesar's dream of a perfect Rome. It's also a delight for set workers, since the humongous pillars, 10 feet through at the base, are on small hidden wheels, so they can be shoved around at director Peter Hewitt's command. The columns resemble colossal chess pieces as they drift quietly around the smooth white floor at the base of the stairs that lead to God. Alex Winter, who plays Bill, actually prefers Hell.

"Hell is going to be cool."

It's very interesting, visually, a different take on Hell, a very imaginative one. Heaven is neat-looking, a 30’s concept of Heaven, but it's kind of boring. Hell has some cojones." It's near production's end, and everyone is in a relaxed mood. Most of the actors - including the returning George Carlin - have finished and gone, but Bill (Winter) & Ted (Keanu Reeves) are still here, presenting their case for being returned to Earth to the Lord Himself. (God will be represented by a bright light offstage; George Burns must have been busy.) Bill & Ted, and their traveling companion, the Grim Reaper (William Sadler) -yes, Death himself - have mugged some Heavenly inhabitants for their clothes. Over his usual outfit, Bill is wearing a long lavender trenchcoat and a bell-shaped hat; Ted is dressed in lavender coveralls and a farmer's hat. Death's black cloak is covered in a lavender apron, and he's wearing a woman's hat on his hood. (He's also wearing seven-inch lifts on his feet, but you can't see those.) Bill & Ted somewhat tentatively introduce themselves to Jehovah, concluding their speech with the naively defiant announcement that they are the "Wyld Stallyns" (their band name).

Bill & Ted
"In a nutshell," director Hewitt says quietly, "an evil genius in the future is sick of Bill & Ted. He sends two evil robot duplicates of Bill & Ted back in time; their mission is to eliminate Bill & Ted, and preach his word, so that he [De Nomolos, played by Joss Ackland] will change history, and evil will rule." It looks at first as though things are going great. The two robots—also Winter and Reeves, of course—arrive in the present, where Bill & Ted are now living by themselves in a Hollywood apartment. They're working at Pretzels 'n' Cheez, still going with the Princesses they picked up in Medieval England in the first movie (who have just celebrated their 525th birthdays), and eager to prove themselves musically. They already know they will be the two most important dudes in history, and the greatest musicians, but they do have to get through the Battle of the Bands first.

While Bill & Ted are watching Star Trek (though Winter says he personally prefers Lost in Space), Evil Bill & Evil Ted - as the robots call each other - kidnap them, take them to the desert and kill them. Then, the duplicates go back to date the Princesses, with the goal of performing horribly in the Battle of the Bands, and thereby bringing about the future De Nomolos wants. Meanwhile, Bill & Ted meet the Grim Reaper. "The boys have died," William Sadler explains, "so he comes to get their souls. It's just another day's work to him. But it's Bill & Ted, and the first thing they do is pull Death's shorts up in the back, then they run away. They do end up in Hell - in fact, they like breaking rocks in Hell, but they decide maybe this isn't what they want to do for the rest of eternity. There's only one way out of this, to save themselves and the babes, and that's to play the Reaper." Then, Bill & Ted are confronted with their ultimate nightmares. "See," says Keanu Reeves, "when we go to Hell, to Hades [pronounced "Hayds" - by Ted, anyway], Beelzebub sends us down into the tunnels of Hades, and we're confronted by our own particular nightmares. My nightmare is that when I was 10 years old, I took my brother's Easter basket, so now I'm haunted by the Easter Bunny." Bill's nightmare is "my grandmother, whom I play, who was always after me when I was a kid, one of those very affectionate grandmothers. So when I go to Hell, I become myself at six years old, and she has this big mustachio." Reeves cheerfully interrupts, "She's like a lip-licking, give-me-a-kissin' nightmare." "She's extremely deranged," Winter agrees. "She has a lot of moxie for a woman of, like, 165." Later, De Nomolos finds a way of un-leashing the nightmare fears into reality, says Reeves, "then the Easter Bunny turns into this nine-foot-tall, hippity-hoppin', egg-deliverin' behemoth." Winter and Reeves point out that Granny, the Easter Bunny and other weirdies were created by Kevin Yagher. "Let's give FX ace Kevin Yagher a hand," Reeves says, and he and Winter solemnly applaud.

Bill & Ted are indeed silly, but they aren't like Station, one guy in two bodies. "Actually, they are very different. You can sum it up this way," Hewitt explains. "Ted is the one who always says, 'What do we do?' Bill thinks about it, then says, 'I don't know, what do you think?' Then, Ted comes up with the answers, saying. 'Why don't we do this?' And Bill says, 'Yeah, that's brilliant!' So, Ted is always under the illusion that Bill is coming up with these ideas, while it's really Ted himself." Winter and Reeves, he points out, "know these characters incredibly well," having not only played the roles in the first film, but having done the voices for the current cartoon series, too. "My job with them, more often than not, is just to sit there and laugh at what they are doing, and occasionally suggest things. Ordinarily, they'll chat among themselves and come up with great stuff. It was fun to work with them."

Death & Twister
William Sadler thinks so, too. Sadler is very unlike the head villain he played in Die Hard 2. He's friendly, talkative and smaller than you would think, but it's still unnerving to chat with a guy who's made up as Death, with a white face, no eyebrows and pale lavender highlights. He's pleased to be able to vary his usual onscreen villainy (he was nothing less than sensational in Walter Hill's Tales from the Crypt episode, "The Man Who Was Death") with this comic turn on a classic idea. His Grim Reaper is designed to resemble Death from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, but there the resemblances end.

"There's an actor I worked with a long time ago," says Sadler, explaining how he developed the character, "who wud talk like siss all dah time. He waz fram Czechoslovakia. and I sought it waz fahnny. Well, Death isn't from New Jersey. So I put on the accent, and in the auditions, I gave them this kind of timeless dead eyes that people get when they're in the death business. When I started saying the lines with that accent, looking like that, it was funny. The more serious you play it, the funnier it gets.

"Pity poor Death. Tons of uneventful work, and now these two yahoos challenge him for the right to return to their unfinished lives. As in The Seventh Seal, in which Death plays chess with a crusader, the Grim Reaper in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey takes on the heroes in games of chance. But here it's a video game, Battleship, Twister and Clue. And they beat the socks off Death. "Best two out of sree?" he uneasily suggests, but they still whomp him. "It's the worst day Death has ever had," laughs Sadler. "The most humiliating, the worst possible set of events." He begins to worry about being liked. "Don't zhoo like me?" he plaintively asks Bill & Ted.

"We come back to Earth with Station, the scientist from another planet, and go to a Builders' Emporium. Death has never been involved in any Earthly ventures before, and now, he's trying to save the babes. By the movie's end, he's singing a rap song in the Battle of the Bands, and playing bass in Wyld Stallyns-and enjoying the hell out of it. He becomes thoroughly Bill & Ted-ized." Kroopf and Hewitt hope the audience will be, too. Kroopf is placing his confidence in Hewitt, who, he says, "has the quality of really talented directors, of being able to have an incredibly strong vision of what he wants, and just enough flexibility so that he can fool with it a bit when he 's on the stage" If 'two shots need abruptly to be combined, "he gives you a shot that is brilliant and does do it all in one. It's a little unnerving, because that's the confidence and boldness of a director who has done it a thousand times before." As for Peter Hewitt, he feels the appeal of the movie rests in Bill & Ted themselves. "Everybody at some time in their life has had a friend they can communicate with without even looking. You find yourselves opening your mouths and saying the same things at the same time, you speak in the same inflections. I suppose the appeal is that, two buddies having a good time."