Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #114: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989).

Meet super-slackers and potheads Bill Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves). They've been spending so much time in Bill's shed rocking out as the Wyld Stallyns, that they're flunking history class. When Bill's father learns of this, he threatens to send his son to military school in Alaska unless he turns things around. They're stumped about how to do this, until they encounter angel Rufus (George Carlin) and his time-travelling phone box. With Rufus' encouragement, these two adolescent doofuses now traverse back through time and space to meet some of history's most significant figures and bring them together for a history project that will hopefully help them make the grade.

Following on the heels of 1985's biggest hit Back to the Future, 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure puts more emphasis on its protagonists' slacker lifestyles and cuts its own entertaining voice by deliberately straying from the time- and space travel laws of more traditional science fiction like that classic, which combined an adherence to them with a genuinely witty and energetic narrative approach. This, however, has its heroes meet Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sigmund Freud and Billy the Kid as it swings back and forth through history. Working from Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon's hilarious and hip screenplay, Stephen Herek (who later made The Mighty Ducks among other things), directs it happily with a complete lack of self-consciousness but nonetheless firmly grips the character relationships for more resonance. Reeves, before he stopped a bus from exploding in Speed and dodged bullets in The Matrix, and Winter, who went practically nowhere despite having more expression than Reeves (although, who doesn't?), make this into a bromance with genuine chemistry and affection, but for me the cast's MVP is Aussie Terry Camilleri, whose Napoleon is all the more entertaining as he grows more and more imperious but bumbling. Keep an eye out also for Bruce Springsteen's former saxophonist, the late, great Clarence Clemons in a very brief cameo.

Obviously, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is unlikely to appear in any History class viewing syllabus, or even on any list of SF purists' time travel flicks. But that's because it was always meant to defy the conventions of both those categories, and it does so hysterically and without feeling like it was trying to. It is, as the boys would say, most triumphant.