Movies
Death Returns In ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’!
As if you needed another reason to plead for the long-gestured Bill & Ted sequel, it appears the Wyld Stallyns’ are going to be reuniting with their bass player, DEATH.
Demon Knight‘s William Sadler stole the show as the Grim Reaper in Peter Hewitt’s 1991 Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, losing to the duo in a series of challenges and eventually joining the band as their bassist. His scene-stealing “Reaper Rap” helped the duo win the Battle of the Bands and save the world from Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland).
In the next film, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Sadler could reprise his role, which was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Franchise writer Ed Solomon tweeted out this bombshell after sharing more news on the third film:
Bill CRUSHED it as Death. And we laughed a lot writing him in BT3 – so let’s hope it’s something that happens
— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) February 18, 2018
Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest) is attached to direct Bill & Ted Face the Music, which will see Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves play middle-aged versions of Bill and Ted, who are now family men rather than young aspiring musicians. However, the death of actor/comedian George Carlin in 2008 posed a problem when it came to the character of Bill and Ted’s mentor Rufus, explains Digital Spy, who also spoke to Solomon about the sequel.
“George Carlin is so deeply missed by all of us. There is a… not just an homage to him, it’s more than that. His absence is a part of the whole movie.”
The threequel will see the older Bill and Ted travel back in time, Solomon revealed, to interact with both their past selves and Rufus – using footage from 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Strange things will once more be afoot at the Circle K…
Solomon confirmed that he’s still in meetings trying to get Bill & Ted Face the Music made and that the film “keeps getting close” to a green-light… so what’s actually preventing it from happening?
One issue, he explained, is that Hollywood prefers the idea of a Bill & Ted reboot, as opposed to a straight sequel. “We are having issues raising money for it, getting it financed, because what we get all the time – all the time – is people wanting to reboot it.”
He continues: “It’s ‘Let’s do Bill & Ted with new teenagers’, but what we wanna do is the story of Bill and Ted as middle-aged men, and tell what we think could be a really funny, and actually really moving, story about their lives and where they are now – their families, their kids…”
After traveling through time, and going to both Heaven and Hell, Bill & Ted have yet to transport through dimensional time and space – something that could wrap up this heavy metal comedy franchise if it were to ever get the support it deserves.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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