Director: Stephen Herek
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin, Hal Landon Jr.
Have I Seen it Before: Uhhh… Yeah. I first became interested in my wife because she randomly mentioned both this film and Back to the Future (1985) in a conversation. It lives in me.
Did I Like It: I remember my fourth grade teacher saying at one point that both this movie and the characters within it were among the dumbest she had ever seen. That statement stuck with me beyond anything else that particular educator said (including her name, now that I think about it) is both an indictment of anything that happened at an institute named after Robert E. Lee, and the fact that even at the age of 10 I so vehemently disagreed with this assessment so immediately.
The movie is not stupid. Any movie that pins a button on the uniform of Napoleon Bonaparte (Terry Camilleri) for eating ice cream and then makes him an absolute fiend for water slides is not stupid. I could keep going on this list of reasons the film itself is not stupid, when you should really go watch the film and experience it for yourself.
But Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) are not dumb, either. They are exceptionally bright, sort of ridiculously so, but incomplete as people. They are ignorant, but not willfully ignorant. Therein lies their charm. They learn an exceptionally large amounts of information about history in 90 minutes of runtime.
Now, there is a moment in the film that plays so sourly that one is immediately tempted to think the whole movie suffers. After thinking that Ted had died at the hand of one of their antagonists in Medieval England, the members of Wyld Stallyns are reunited and embrace. Horrified, they immiedately push away from one another and call each other fags.
Now, unlike Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) which went out of its way to predicate its entire plot on each and every character being suddenly and irreparably transphobic, this moment may not age well, but it does feel like two teenage boys of the 1980s would probably have internalize this precise measure of homophobic toxic masculinity. This alone makes their fate as the saviors of all human kind far harder to swallow then any amateurish guitar riff they might play.
They do get better, as Rufus says. We’ll all see soon enough, but even the course of this excellent adventure they have made quantum leaps forward in that regard.