Whatever happened to Bill & Ted? Well, yes, we all know that Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) went on to star in films such as The Matrix, A Scanner Darkly and - most boring blockbuster ever - The Day The Earth Stood Still; but what of his fellow Wyld Stallyn, namely Bill S. Preston esq?

Otherwise known as Alex Winter, pre-Bill he had a role as one of the vampires in 80's gaudy horror classic The Lost Boys, but post time travelling slacker dude Winter made less of mainstream splash than his floppy haired compadre. After the release of the (far superior) sequel Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Winter, a film school graduate, co-wrote and directed a movie of his own. Buoyed by the off-beat success of the Bill & Ted films 20th Century Fox handed Winter $12million to make a rather ambitious and very strange low-brow comedy, which they eventually tried to bury.

The film Winter put together is definitely not to everyone's tastes, for starters it's very punk in its aesthetic, quite similarly choppy in pace to Alex Cox's well-regarded Repo Man, but at the same time it pays homage to video-nasties such as Cannibal Holocaust via Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation and sophisticated prosphetic effects work. It is, at once, extremely dumb comedy, bordering on a Naked Gun-style spoof, but then again it's a very smart, wry and sarcastic satire of many things, including itself.

It tells the tale of a Hollywood star called Ricky Coogan (Winter), famed for a series of movies known as 'Ghost Dude' with the catch-phrase "Boo, dude!"; possibly a thinly veiled jibe at the nature of post-Bill & Ted typecasting. He is hired by a shady corporation to travel to South America to promote a 'harmless' chemical called Zygrot 24. However Coogan ends up at Elijah C. Skuggs' (Randy Quaid) Freekland and finds himself transformed into a half-man, half-creature known as Beast Boy. From here he struggles to adjust amongst the other freaks imprisoned by Elijah; including a human worm, Cowboy, Nosey, Sockhead, the Bearded Lady (played by Mr. T) and Ortiz the Dog Boy (a near unrecognisable cameo by Keanu Reeves).

Now clearly, plot is not high on this film's agenda, instead what we have are a loosely strung together hodge podge of surreal sequences and sketches in the manner of, dare I say, a Monty Python movie albeit one skewed through the more purile mannerisms of a Kevin Smith remake of a trashy Grindhouse flick. It is quite a hit and miss film and some of its pop culture references have dated, but it moves by at an alarming pace and throws in so many ideas, wild visual flourishes and has some - even to this day - quite wonderful special effects.

Unfortunately there was a changing of the guard at Fox and they decided to release the film in a grand total of two cinemas across America, where it, unsurprisingly, flopped. The studio even, according to Freaked's writers, fired the producer in charge of the production for making 'too many weird movies'. Fortunately Freaked has earned a slow and steady cult following and was quite recently treated to a bumper DVD release from indie label Anchor Bay, which also went some way to explain the machniations behind the scenes on the film and how a financier can go from throwing money your way to trying to sweep you under the carpet.

Fans of Bill & Ted would be advised to take a punt on Freaked, as well as those who enjoy the twisted charms of the Evil Dead sequels, or even kids who grew up loving The Addams Family. Freaked is a one of a kind movie and it's a shame that its failure prevented Winter from getting to continue in this ilk as a director, his co-writers on the film Tim Burns and Tom Stern wound up writing the early drafts for the - heavily re-written - sequel An American Werewolf in Paris, finding small audiences for their work on the fringes of contemporary pop culture but it seems that Freaked, deserverdly so, will continue to be their crowning glory and, as time goes on, will crawl it's grotesque, drooling way to further prominence in the cult movie marketplace...