Alex Winter cut his teeth in zany comedies. As a time travelling high schooler in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey, he achieved cult status early in his career, leading to an uphill battle to be anyone other than Bill S Preston, Esq.

It’s the Luke Skywalker effect: just as Mark Hamill went into voice acting to escape a galaxy far, far away, Winter took to directing to shed all things Wyld Stallyns, helming critically acclaimed documentaries on the impact of technology — Deep Web and The YouTube Effect are standouts.

Now, he returns to the genre that made him famous. After Bill & Ted Face The Music in 2020, Winter is embracing his status as a cult icon and aiming to rekindle a lost art: the mid-budget ’80s comedy.
After a stroke puts their mother in hospital, siblings Noah (Josh Gad) and Megan (Kaya Scodelario) return to their childhood home expecting nostalgia and childhood memories in the very walls of the house, not a literal corpse.

Their neighbour Patty, mummified after thirty years of preservation, has been boarded up inside a wall, a secret that has plagued their mother and father for decades, and has now passed to them. Their inheritance isn’t a family home or lump sum, then, but a deceased woman in need of disposal. If only the state of play were so singular; Billie Lourd’s blackmailing career — a villain so cartoonish she’s apt to twirl a stick-on moustache at any moment — holds the siblings to ransom, whilst their criminal cousin Bodie (Anthony Carrigan) is recruited to scare her off. It’s goofball antics all round. And it’s a classic case of a winning concept cut down by lackluster execution.

What begins as a crime caper brimming with personality — Winter’s confident direction puts Gad, a true comedic talent, rightly front and centre — quickly descends into chaos: Michael M.B Galvin’s script isn’t built on solid enough ground to offer much past the initial set-up, trading Noah and Megan’s comic paranoia over the dead body for shootouts and yawn-inducing sword fights.

What is apparent is Winter’s zeal. His passion is contagious, as he wrestles a flat script to some sort of life like Victor Frankenstein on his doomed quest. It’s a losing battle, but you find yourself rooting for the Bill & Ted alum to stick the landing and kick this lumbering affair into high gear. Yet, the signposts of an airless conclusion are there from the off.

Adulthood is a fossil in many respects, a bygone ’80s flick tarted up with a coat of 2025 paint. Expect vomit jokes and stoner big brothers, and lots of pantomime murders. Josh Gad is excellent, though the rest of the cast is so-so.

What’s missing here is maturity, and a sense of style that its inspirations, Gremlins and Big and Twins had in spades. Winter is on cloud nine, even popping up as the town eccentric, Doug, son of the murdered woman, but there’s no one high spot that can save this. Its problems are foundational, rotten like Patty’s corpse boarded-up in that wall.

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