June 10, 1994
I put ERNEST GOES TO SCHOOL on my schedule because it was on a list of June 1994 releases, but upon further research I realized they didn’t exactly attempt to mount a challenge to SPEED and CITY SLICKERS II. They only gave it a limited release in Connecticut (nickname: “The Ernest State”) before the rest of the country got it on video in December. So I could have very justifiably skipped reviewing it in this series. But never let it be said that I retreated from my search for knowledge. Ernest, going to school!? I mean, how is something like that gonna pan out? I had to know.
It occurs to me that I’ve never reviewed an Ernest P. Worrell movie before, so I’ve never had a chance to note that back in the Ain’t It Cool days some people thought my name was a reference to the off camera character Ernest was talking to in the commercials and TV series he did, or that it was funny to write “Know whut I mean, Vern?” in response to my reviews. Both were incorrect.
This one was the sixth Ernest motion picture, or seventh if you include DR. OTTO AND THE RIDDLE OF THE GLOOM BEAM (1985), where Jim Varney played several characters, including Ernest. There were three more after this, all DTV, and out of the whole series this is the only one not directed by John Cherry. Instead the honor goes to Coke Sams, writer of most of the Ernest works going back to the beginning.
Given the international readership here I’m sure some people will have no idea who Ernest is. And I’m not sure I know how to explain him. Varney and Cherry created the character for Cherry’s Nashville advertising agency, first using him in a commercial for a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders appearance at an amusement park in Kentucky. He ended up advertising all kinds of products, then having a Saturday morning TV show, then a series of broad PG-rated comedies. He’s sort of a low class southern stereotype, a guy who’s supposed to be very dumb but also will jibber jabber about arcane knowledge. He’s oblivious about how much he annoys people and in the movies bumbles through various slapstick catastrophes.
In this one Ernest is the janitor/handyman at a high school that the school board wants to shut down, and as a dirty trick they make a new rule that everyone on staff must have a diploma. Now Ernest must finish his senior year of high school or lose his job, which he says is “my life, my career, my spiritual fulfillment.” So he’s given a locker and a class schedule and gets into various antics, gags, humor, you name it. Anything could happen.
I have to admit when I realized the premise of the movie I perked up at its potential for absurdity or even transgressiveness. Here is a clueless adult man in a movie about finishing high school, it could be really funny to put him in common teen movie tropes. Yeah, getting a date for the prom would be inappropriate, but this was only 6 years after PLAIN CLOTHES, a more serious movie where an adult undercover cop leads different girls on before making it with a teacher. Even if they didn’t go there it could be really funny to watch Ernest try to fit in, eventually impress the popular crowd, but realize he’s leaving behind his nerd friends, that kind of stuff.
They don’t really do that, but it is kind of funny how two dipshit football players played by Russell Porter (Menahem Golan’s HANNA’S WAR) and one William Sasso (SKI SCHOOL 2) hate Ernest and constantly bully him and giggle at him. He’s actually more into football than them and always talks about his high school sports career, but they think he’s a weirdo so they pick on him. Meanwhile, there are a couple of nerdy kids who make sympathetic expressions when people are cruel to him, and one who befriends him in band class, where he has a crush on the teacher, Miss Flugal (Corrine Koslo, SWITCHING CHANNELS).
In the cartoonish world of Ernest, wrestling in gym class is the same as pro wrestling, with a ring and everything. For some reason the gym teacher hates Ernest and wants to have him brutally assaulted (I guess all jocks hate Ernest?) and makes him fight a ringer in class, but Ernest tries to warn about his “extensive experience in the WWF” and something about the Hulkster and Ultimate Warrior in Wrestlemania. It doesn’t seem in character for him to make up a story like that so I assumed it was referring to some wacky Wrestlemania event Ernest fans would’ve known about at the time, but after some quick research I don’t think that’s the case. I did however learn that four years later there was a script written for a RASSLIN’ ERNEST that they tried to interest the WWF in sponsoring.
After some of those sorts of shenanigans we’re led into the main gimmick of the movie by Gerta (Linda Kash, a regular for both Ernest and Christopher Guest movies), a science teacher who combines an exaggerated German accent with at least two different speech impediments. She beckons Ernest from a secret entrance inside his locker to a mad science lab where she uses an experimental “subatomic brain accelerator” to supercharge his mind. (This is depicted with some imagery that made me think for a second it was gonna go into JOHNNY MNEMONIC territory, but not quite.) I like the line where she jokes he’ll be able to rewrite the theory of relativity and he says, “Well, if you think it really needs it.”
So the main gimmick of the movie is that he can temporarily turn smart each time he gets a jolt. “Smart” Ernest of course is a total snob, puts on a phony upper crust accent, appreciates fine art, also wears glasses and a tie (but under a corduroy vest to stay true to his redneck heritage). He’s good at trumpet and takes over teaching the band to play John Phillips Sousa joints for the big game.
I have very little Ernest experience. I do remember that I saw ERNEST GOES TO CAMP in the theater and liked it, but then I became a teenager and never saw another one until now. I feel like I sort of get the appeal because he seems related to this particular type of character-based comedy movie I’ve always gravitated to, mostly sketch comedy people who get a chance to make a movie and do it as kind of a skewed, campy, live action cartoon. Of course you’ve got Pee-wee Herman way up at the top, CABIN BOY on a tier below him, maybe STRANGE BREW, UHF and the Elvira movies somewhere below that. Even in this pretty shoddy barely released one there’s sort of a DIY, hand-made-by-hobbyists quality to the props like his Supreme-o-vac invention or the machines in the lab. I don’t like this one, it’s very stupid and mostly unfunny to me, but at least it’s made with detectable traces of love and care.
For example, in this type of movie they sometimes go off on random tangents of reality just for fun, so in this one he suddenly imagines the school as a western town with tumbleweeds blowing down the halls, and a shadowy Clint-Eastwood-soundalike (David Keith, FIRESTARTER, WHITE OF THE EYE) rides up on a horse and talks to him. I mean, it’s not funny, but it’s effort they were not expected to expend.
And also I can imagine that when I was really little I would’ve gotten a kick out of the long slapstick sequence where he’s trying to fix a pipe and getting sprayed and moving toilets around and stuff. Even moreso if there had been poop involved, but I think we can all now face the fact that toilets alone are funny at that age.
One very dumb thing that was kind of funny to me even as an adult is how when he has a machine that’s out of control and smashes it to bits but there’s still a small piece making noise he considers what to do and decides on putting it in his mouth. I can’t explain it, I don’t know what he’s thinking, I just like it. (He does it twice in this so it may be one of his trademarks, I have no idea.)
Art director Helen Jarvis started on ERNEST RIDES AGAIN, and this was her second movie. Since her stint with Ernest she has also worked with John McTiernan (THE 13TH WARRIOR), John Frankenheimer (REINDEER GAMES, ROLLERBALL), Alex Proyas (I, ROBOT), Zack Snyder (WATCHMEN) and Professor Xavier (X2 and X3).
It would be pretty great if some future Oscar winner or something played one of the students, but we’ll have to settle for a couple familiar faces. Will Sasso, who played one of the jock assholes, was later on Mad TV and people used to always email me about him doing a Seagal imitation on there. I enjoyed him as Curly in THE THREE STOOGES. Also Sarah Chalke plays a nice girl in band class named Maisy, and she had recently taken over the part of Becky on Roseanne when this came out. So I guess it was a reunion when a few years later Varney had a recurring role as Jackie’s boyfriend Prince Carlos on the weird (almost) final season of the show that turned out to be fictional short stories Roseanne wrote after Dan died of a heart attack. (I guess that in itself was retconned, I didn’t see the new season.)
Varney followed ERNEST GOES TO SCHOOL by playing “Snake” in Jeff Speakman’s THE EXPERT, which I assume was what got him taken seriously enough to snag the role of Slinky Dog in TOY STORY.
You know what else would’ve been cool would be if after Ernest goes back to school it just turns into a totally straight inspirational teacher movie like DANGEROUS MINDS only with Ernest as one of the students. He’s just one subplot so you keep getting involved in the teacher’s challenges and forget it’s an Ernest movie until he shows up again. Or if it was ERNEST GETS A G.E.D. and he has to take classes in the city and maybe it turns into a dark thriller where he’s stalked by a serial killer, like NIGHT SCHOOL. Hey Ernest people hit me up if you ever have a time machine and want to do more of these. I’m full of ideas.
Summer ’94 connections: ERNEST GOES TO SCHOOL is almost as cheesy as 3 NINJAS KICK BACK, and sure enough Varney later played a villain in 3 NINJAS: HIGH NOON AT MEGA MOUNTAIN.
June 13th, 2024 at 12:20 pm
My daughter was recently accepted to UCLA and as we were looking around for scholarship opportunities at the school, I was surprised to see that there was a full-ride Jim Varney scholarship for students from Kentucky and Tennessee (
). Unfortunately, we don’t live in either state, so we could not apply, but it does seem that perhaps his work in this film did inspire him to move down a Dangerous Minds path of lifting up the next generation of Southern youth.