Angels in the Endzone

Gary Nadeau, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 28%

This is a made-for-TV sequel to Angels in the Outfield, and I think the simplest way to summarize this movie's plot is to point out the ways it differs from its forerunner:

1. Angels in the Outfield was about a baseball team called the Angels. Angels in the Endzone is about a football team called the Angels.

2. Angels in the Outfield was about professional athletes. This is about high school athletes.

3. Angels in the Outfield revolved around a kid who had been abandoned by his father. Angels in the Endzone is about two kids whose father is dead.

4. Angels in the Outfield was good.

Beyond that, you can just import all of your knowledge of the plot of the previous movie into the entry for this one. But if you'd like a little bit more information, read on.

Jesse (Matthew Lawrence) and Kevin (the kid from Richie Rich's Christmas Wish) are two brothers who have a perfect relationship with their father. He loves them, he teaches them to play football, and in general he spends copious amounts of Time with His Children. In fact, their relationship is so perfect, that the only conceivable conclusion is that this character is going to die in the first act.

And so he does, sending Jesse into a deep depression. He quits the (jaw-droppingly incompetent) high school football team before their first game, he becomes distant from his family, and he ditches class to hang out with the bad kids. These lowlifes make their living betting against the home team, taking advantage of the school-spirited freshmen who are naive enough to think the Angels have a prayer of winning.

About three quarters of the way through the movie, they graduate from book-making to robbing a gas station. They've dragged Jesse along for the ride, and for a few minutes we're led to believe he's been implicated in the crime, but no—his mom and the police immediately accept his (true) version of events, and nothing comes of it. I mention this not because it's interesting, but because it's a good example of the amount of thought that seems to have gone into the story.

As for the other brother, Kevin, his role is limited entirely to replicating Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character from the first movie. Jesse tells the boy that their family will never be okay until the day the Westfield Angels win the state championship. This, of course, parallels a similar line delivered by the deadbeat dad in Outfield. In that movie, young JoGo misunderstood his dad's sarcasm and prayed for the Angels to win the Pennant, but here, it's not really clear what Kevin thinks. I don't think he really believes that his family's well-being is connected to the football championship, but he prays for the team to win. It's almost as if he's aware that what he's doing is required by the plot.

Just like in the first movie, the real angels take to the field to perform obviously impossible feats, but no one in the stands is the wiser. (At one point, the football flies literally the entire length of the field under its own power, and no one seems to question how this is possible.) Somehow the divine manipulation of sporting events seems even more inappropriate when it's a bunch of teenagers the angels are cheating against. Then there is the obligatory subplot about how the adults think Kevin is hallucinating (including an appalling scene where a school counselor puts the moves on Kevin's widowed mother).

All the while, Jesse refuses to rejoin his team, because football brings up painful memories of his father. Finally, the coach has a heart-to-heart with Jesse and reminds him that his father was proud of his talent and would want him to continue playing The Game of Football. So Jesse agrees to play the championship game, which he wins without the help of the angels.

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I guess this is all right for a made-for-TV movie. The guy who plays the coach gives a workmanlike performance, and the mom isn't bad. There is also an assistant coach who seems to be channeling Harold from the Red Green Show; I could have done without him. The main brothers are fine.

One other thing: For a movie about divine beings, Angels in the Outfield didn't really have much religious content. This one seems to have more of a Calvinist attitude. There's a scene where Jesse blames himself for his father's accident, and his mother—rather than just reminding Jesse that he wasn't responsible—insists that nothing could have prevented his death. It's a pretty jarringly fatalistic comment, and the movie just leaves it at that. Maybe the kid from Seventh Heaven had a subconscious effect on the writers.

Ernest Rides Again

John Cherry, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 14%

It was difficult to find a poster for this movie. Most of the images I found were too small to be usable, so I resorted to this strange confetti-themed option. This seems to have been the theatrical poster, and it mentions the short subject "Mr. Bill Goes to Washington," which was screened together with Ernest Rides Again and also appeared on the VHS.

The other images were all DVD covers, and most of them included a blurb from the Boston Globe declaring this "The best of the series." Now, I don't think I'm out of line if I consider myself an authority on Ernest, and I can't imagine anyone thinking this was the best Ernest movie. This was the first one produced without the backing of Disney, and it certainly shows. Even the poster is half-assed—just look at the stock close-up of Ernest they used. He never even wears that white thermal Henley shirt in the movie (or in any other movie, for that matter). And I don't recall any confetti being involved in the plot.

Speaking of the plot, we now find Ernest working as custodian at a Virginia college, where he amuses himself by pretending to be Indiana Jones and palling around with a history professor named Dr. Melon. Melon likes Ernest, but he is put off by Ernest's monumental childishness. Melon's colleagues think the good doctor is a crank, obsessed with a half-baked theory that the real Crown Jewels of England are hidden in a Revolutionary War cannon called Goliath.

Now get ready for this, because this is going to stun you: The theory is true, and the cannon is located near the college. And they find it. The rest of the movie is largely taken up by a series of chase sequences, as Ernest and Dr. Melon try to protect the cannon and the jewels from a sinister looter named Glencliff. This mostly involves the cannon rolling down the highway at high speed, but somehow making all the turns and staying safely on the road. Unbeknownst to our heroes, MI-6 has also taken an interest, and some secret agents join the chase.

Dr. Melon has surmised based on various historical sources that the Crown Jewels are in the barrel of the cannon, but Ernest eventually discovers them in a powder barrel beside the cannon. He places the crown on his head, whereupon Glencliff captures him. The crown is stuck so tightly to Ernest's head that Glencliff tries to remove it with a cranial saw; unfortunately, the saw fails to make a scratch on Ernest's skull. ("Good thing it hit the hard end," Ernest explains.)

The secret agents close in and save Ernest, but since the crown cannot be removed from his head, they declare that he must now serve as King of England. Ernest doesn't care for the idea ("I'd have to learn the language!"), and luckily the crown slips off during a "what's that on your shirt" prank.

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As I indicated above, this is far from the best in the series. In fact, it was the last to be released theatrically; beginning with Ernest Goes to School, the rest would be released direct to VHS, which, frankly, was for the best. I remember renting these things from Blockbuster on weekends in elementary school and watching them repeatedly. Clearly, that's what they were made for, and there was no sense releasing them to an unappreciative public full of fuddy-duddy adults.

This was also Linda Kasch's first of three appearances in an Ernest movie, this time as Dr. Melon's overbearing wife Nan. She is accompanied in most of her scenes by two ineffectual door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen who have the irritating habit of finishing each other's sentences. These roles cry out to be played by Gailard Sartain and Bill Byrge from the Disney installments, but alas, that comedy duo would never return.

But there's one other thing this movie has, and that's the best song in the world, the Ballad of Ernest P. Worrell: listen for yourself.