The Importance of Being Ernest: Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)

My exhaustive exploration of the films of Ernest P. Worrell continues with a fond look back at the masterpiece that marked the end of the trash icon's Golden Age

There’s something bittersweet, even melancholy about the place 1991’s Ernest Scared Stupid holds in Ernest P. Worrell mythology. The Halloween-themed horror comedy marks the end of an era and the close of Ernest’s Golden Age. 

For four glorious years Disney honored the legacy of its founder and longtime leader by employing the services of Jim Varney as hillbilly hero Ernest P. Worrell in a quartet of motion picture masterpieces. 

For the first time in its whole miserable existence Disney was finally responsible for something that brought people joy and made moviegoers happy: an Ernest movie. 

A series of legendary collaborations ensued. Disney, through Touchstone, made movies about Ernest P. Worrell as a savvy investment, since his movies tended to be cheap and profitable, but also as a public service. 

Disney gave Varney and his collaborators millions of dollars to realize his cinematic ambitions. That doesn’t sound like a lot, and generally isn’t, but it is for a guy like Varney, who was used to banging out content quickly and cheaply for an endless series of local commercial clients.

Disney’s millions got Ernest theatrical releases with ad campaigns and publicity tours and reviews, albeit generally of the enthusiastically negative variety, in all the big newspapers and television shows. 

Touchstone’s budgets attracted co-stars like Ernest Goes to Camp’s John Vernon and Lyle Alzado, Ernest Goes to Prison’s Charles Napier and Randall “Tex” Cobb and Ernest Scared Stupid’s Eartha Kitt. 

Those may not have been the biggest names in the business but they’re all solid character actors with impressive legacies. Ernest’s early Touchstone movies took up cultural space just by virtue of being theatrically released in a way his direct-to-video cheapies could not and did not. 

Alas, after Ernest Scared Stupid under-performed at the box office Touchstone turned their back on Varney. I’d like to think that they cursed themselves for eternity by doing so but they honestly seem to be doing pretty well even without lovable old Ernest P. Worrell.

Ernest would only be the star of one more theatrical vehicle, 1993’s Ernest Rides Again and then four direct to video movies. 

But before Ernest’s fall from grace he first wowed children, and pretty much only children, with a Halloween-themed spook fest that is to Gen-Xers what Easy Rider was to the 1960s counter-culture: a towering masterpiece that changed film forever and defined a generation. 

At the very least Ernest Scared Stupid got under our skin. It infected our individual and collective imagination with images, moments and characters that we will never forget. 

Ernest Scared Stupid opens with a flurry of clips from classic horror movie monsters intercut with Ernest responding with varying degrees and fear and mortification. 

It’s the essence of constructive editing, splicing together images to tell a story and create a new reality. But it’s also a testament to Varney’s magnetism that he doesn’t need gags or words or material to be funny. 

Varney just needs that endlessly expressive rubber face and a level of raw charisma and sexual magnetism not seen since the early days of James Dean and Marlon Brando. 

We begin with a prologue that affords Varney yet another opportunity to play someone other than Ernest P. Worrell. In this case that’s ancestor Phineas Worrell, a 19th century town elder introduced sealing a troll named Tantor inside an oak tree to contain his evil. 

An enraged Tantor puts a curse on the Worrell family that every generation will be progressively dumber until the dumbest member of the family will unwittingly free the troll from his wooden prison so that he can terrorize the town anew. 

We then leap to the present, where Ernest P. Worrell has fulfilled at least part of the troll’s prophecy by being, in the words of one of the misunderstood juvenile delinquents in Ernest Goes to Camp, dumber than a bucket of hair. 

Ernest may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but he means well. He’s an overgrown third-grader with the pure heart of a child and a cerebellum full of cotton candy and pudding. 

When Ernest pals around with children it doesn’t seem creepy because he seems like a contemporary and a friend more than a grown up or a responsible adult. So when bullies destroy some middle schoolers’ haunted house Ernest offers to help them out by building a tree house on the exact tree that Tantor has been imprisoned inside of for one hundred years. 

They’re fine as long as Ernest does not deliver a specific set of words that will set Tantor free to run amok but Ernest, being an idiot, can’t resist the siren song of doing the stupidest thing possible.

The denim-clad dullard recites the exact words he’s not supposed to and unleashes Tantor to wreak havoc on a new generation of children. 

Ernest’s blundering upsets Francis "Old Lady" Hackmore (Eartha Kits), a wise old woman and the apparent keeper and protector of the town’s darkest secrets. A legend like Kitt could easily sleepwalk through her role in the fourth installment in the Ernest P. Worrell saga. 

The woman is a legend and an icon so it is not surprising that she instead commits one hundred percent to the role with her trademark hypnotic intensity. When it came to filling out the supporting cast in Ernest’s first four movies it was all about getting the right name as opposed to a big name. 

If you’re making a slobs versus slobs camp comedy, for example, you can’t do much better than John Vernon as the head bad guy and Lyle Alzado as his flunky, assuming Ted Knight was unavailable for the role, on account of being dead. 

Charles Napier and Randall “Tex” Cobb are similarly perfect typecasting for the warden and convict sidekick roles in a dark yet PG and family friendly prison comedy like Ernest Goes to Jail. 

Kitt has to be at the top of the list for the wise old lady role for a movie like this. Kitt goes above and beyond when she could easily get away with minimal effort. The same is true of the special effects legends who created the impressively disgusting Tantor and later a whole rampaging troll army: the Chiodo Brothers. 

The geniuses behind such apogees of cinematic excellence as the stop motion animation for Large Marge in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Philo’s true form in UHF, the Critters and Killer Klowns from Outer Space created Tantor and his hideous monster brethren. 

They worked magic on a very limited budget, creating out of rubber and sweat and imagination a troll that is pure nightmare fuel for children. Tantor steals the essence of kiddies by transforming them into wooden dolls. 

This traumatized an entire generation of kids who saw Ernest Scared Stupid in the theaters and/or on home video, and could not get Tantor and his tricks out of their fertile imaginations. 

Ernest Scared Stupid doesn’t need to be scary or creepy. It may be a horror comedy but it’s an Ernest movie first and foremost so audiences weren’t exactly expecting The Exorcist. 

The cult horror movie proved creepier and more unnerving than expected or even desired really. That’s part of what sets it and the rest of the early Ernest movies apart. They soared over the audience’s VERY low expectations by being strange, unexpected and dark in addition to stupid. 

As in his previous vehicles, Ernest talks largely for the pleasure of talking. He is forever monologuing in a way that suggests he doesn’t actually care whether anyone else is listening or paying attention. When Ernest gets into a rant here he doesn’t just change accents and dialects and personas: he changes outfits as well, alternating between an old lady get-up, a proud Roman soldier and of course his beloved Walter Brennan cowpoke character. 

There’s nothing children like more than Walter Brennan impersonations. In show-boating riff mode Varney suggests a redneck variation on Robin Williams’ manic stand-up. 

It’s a shame Varney and Williams both died young and tragically and never worked together. They were both eternal friends of lonely children whose life’s work involved making people happy. 

Williams was the more respected artist but I like to think that had Varney not died at 50, with so much left to give, while that piece of shit Matthew Perry is horribly, inexplicably still alive, he would have won an Oscar as well. 

Unfortunately Varney died young and while I’ve very much enjoyed the journey through his life’s work so far something tells me that we’re about to hit a VERY rough patch now that his Disney period is officially over and his direct-to-video nadir lurks menacingly in the very near future, not unlike Tantor and his wooden dolls of death.