John Cherry, 1987
Rotten Tomatoes score: 62%
I figured, if I'm going to talk about movies that I like that apparently everyone else hates, there's no more obvious place to start than the Ernest series. Certainly it still has its fans (mostly people who, like me, grew up with this character), but the majority of the public seems to have found Ernest irritating from day one.
Ernest P. Worrell was created by Carden & Cherry, a Nashville advertising firm. Jim Varney portrayed the affable redneck in countless local ads all over the U.S. during the 1980s, where Ernest hawked everything from Mello Yello to First Federal Savings. The commercials always featured Ernest talking to his unseen neighbor Vern, mugging to the camera and extolling the virtues of whatever product he was plugging. Usually the commercial would end with Ernest clumsily causing some sort of property damage or Vern angrily ousting Ernest from his home.
It seems bizarre in retrospect that a character created for local TV ads, not even attached to any particular product, could have become popular enough to star in a children's Saturday morning series and nine feature films spanning over a decade.
And yet, that's what happened. The movies are usually despised as predictable, shallow, absurd, aimless, very broad, and annoyingly frenetic. All of those descriptors are accurate, but I still find all of these movies entertaining, some much more so than others. A lot of people find Ernest annoying, and I suppose he is, but that doesn't stop him from being likable. He's always been more of a live-action cartoon than a plausible human being, and not just because of his physics-defying pratfalls. Like all the best cartoon characters, Ernest is constantly winking at his audience (sometimes literally) and reminding us not to take anything we're seeing seriously. Knowhutimean?
Ernest's first big-screen outing, sadly without Vern, came in 1987. In this movie, he's the maintenance man at a boys' summer camp called Camp Kikakee. Ernest loves his job, but his clumsiness gets him into dutch with his boss and makes him the butt of practical jokes at the hands of the campers. All Ernest really wants is to become a counselor and impress the camp's nurse, Ms. St. Cloud, daughter of the Native American chief (Iron Eyes Cody) who owns the camp.
Ernest finally gets his break when a rag-tag bunch of boys enroll at Camp Kikakee as part of a rehab program for juvenile delinquents. Having run their snide, uncaring counselor ragged, the boys are in need of new adult supervision, and Ernest is the person for the job. Predictably, Ernest is the only person at camp willing to give the troubled youths a chance, and gradually they come to respect and admire him.
The real trouble starts when a corrupt mining mogul named Sherman Krader, ably portrayed by John Vernon as an impossibly heartless crook (I don't recall him smiling in any of his scenes), enlists Ernest's unwitting help in swindling Chief St. Cloud into selling him the camp. (We're told the land under the camp is rich in "petrocite," a non-existent but apparently priceless mineral.)
The final act of the movie is no less predictable. Ernest and the kids team up with the camp's wacky mess hall chefs, and all together they bombard the construction crew with disgusting camp food, parachuting snapping turtles, and explosives (clearly marked "smoke bombs," lest we should worry for anyone's safety). In an over-the-top climactic stand-off, Krader arrives with a rifle in tow and proceeds to fire point-blank at Ernest. Fortunately, the spirit of the great Kikakee Warrior has entered Ernest's body, and the bullets can't harm him. (I'm not kidding; this is really how the movie ends.)
So the mining company slinks off in shame, Nurse St. Cloud having obtained a court order for their removal, and we can only assume Sherman Krader goes to prison for attempted murder. Ernest keeps his job as a counselor, the no-longer-troubled youngsters remain at camp, and everyone is happy. The end.
In comparison to the other Ernest movies, this one is unusual. On the positive side, the production values are probably higher for this movie than for any of its sequels (and that's not saying a lot). It's shot in 2.39 widescreen and everything looks colorful and well-photographed. There are some explosions in the climactic scene that look conspicuously expensive.
The soundtrack isn't bad, but it definitely dates itself with a lot of late-80s style movie music, including a song called "Brave Hearts" that could have been ripped right out of the Karate Kid soundtrack. A pleasant surprise is the song "Gee, I'm Glad It's Raining," sung in-character by Jim Varney. It's a melancholy acoustic number that stands up quite well on its own, but it's shoved a little awkwardly into the movie. (This isn't a musical--Why is Ernest singing?)
The Ernest formula is present right from Go: Ernest is struggling with a lowly job, hoping for a promotion and pining for a woman who seems out of his league; he wins the hearts of a group of initially hostile companions; and he ultimately triumphs in a spectacular way, leaving him modestly better off than he started.
Nevertheless, this one doesn't quite have the feel of the rest of the series. It's significantly less zany; I'll leave to you whether that's good or bad. Compared to the storied life he would lead for the next decade, saving a kids' camp is a pretty humdrum adventure. (On the other hand, channeling an ancient warrior spirit and becoming invulnerable to bullets is fairly exciting.) The slapstick is also much less cartoonish, although there are a few over-the-top pratfalls. In fact, it's a little bit jarring to see Ernest in the infirmary after a fist-fight with the mining company's goliath foreman.
(This kind of slapstick haphazardness always bothers me. It's like in The Lion King, where the little bird is no worse for wear after being sat on by a rhino, and then minutes later Mufasa is killed by a stampede. Cartoon violence is fine, but it sits uneasily in the same movie with serious violence that actually leaves a mark.)
No complaints about the supporting cast. The kids all get the job done, especially Hakeem Abdulsamad as Ernest's young confidant Moose, and they scrupulously avoid the all-too-common wisecracking obnoxiousness of this era. As I said above, John Vernon plays his character as a frightening psychopath, without even a hint of audience sympathy, but it works. Gailard Sartain and Daniel Butler are amusing as the camp's off-kilter cooks, desperately trying to perfect an inedible recipe they call "eggs erroneous."
The only thing that disappoints me in this movie is that Ernest himself isn't allowed to do enough. He's basically in "lovable doofus" mode the entire movie, with some naively confident boasting thrown in, but the full Bugs Bunny-esque range of wackiness would have to wait for another movie.
