The Importance of Being Ernest Part 7: Slam Dunk Ernest

At least this isn't as offensive as Ernest Goes to Africa!

We are deep into our exhaustive exploration of the films of Ernest P. Worrell. After this piece only two movies remain, both shot in South Africa and released direct-to-video with a star whose seemingly limitless energy and stamina were drained by the lung cancer that would soon take his life. 

We’re seven films into this most worthwhile and important of cinematic journeys yet 1995’s unfortunate fantasy sports comedy Slam Dunk Ernest marks a beginning for me as well, and not a happy one. 

That’s because I somehow made it forty-two years, including decades as a full-time pop culture writer who specializes in lowbrow, widely mocked and derided entertainment, without seeing an Ernest P. Worrell movie before I watched Slam Dunk Ernest for my discontinued column Control Nathan Rabin. 

Why? I don’t know. It’s possible that I thought that they looked dumb or bad. That’s generally not a deterrent for me but for whatever reason, it’s taken me forty-six years to finally get around to experiencing all of these classic pieces of Americana. 

I was not impressed by Slam Dunk Ernest! I was REALLY not impressed! But that was before I became an Ernest fan and chose to devote at least a few months to watching and writing about all of his vehicles. 

I was a total neophyte the last time I watched Slam Dunk Ernest. I’m nothing short of an Ernestvangelist these days. I come not to bury Ernest P. Worrell but to praise him. I’ve seen the light. I now know what Ernest means. 

Pretty sure this constitutes goal-tending.

Would my newfound affection for all things Ernest lead me to see Slam Dunk Ernest in a new, more flattering light? Would I find things to love about it where it previously left me cold? Or would it remain the first out and out dud in Ernest’s underrated and misunderstood filmography? 

Hope springs eternal when you are a pop culture writer but I’m afraid Slam Dunk Ernest stubbornly refused to improve upon a second viewing. It remains a bewilderingly misguided piece of lowbrow entertainment, particularly in terms of its racial politics and the weirdly central role race plays in it. 

In Slam Dunk Ernest Jim Varney once again plays janitor Ernest P. Worrell but here he’s part of a janitorial team called The Clean Sweep otherwise made up exclusively of NBA-caliber black athletes who live to compete in a league made up of less suspiciously, preternaturally gifted teams. 

Ernest wants to roll with the hoopsters but they all think he’s too white and nerdy. He’s just too white 'n' nerdy, really, really white 'n' nerdy. The good-natured goober has all the enthusiasm in the world but unlike his African-American coworkers, he’s not naturally gifted at basketball. 

At best, Varney’s cornpone creation manages the tricky feat of being simultaneously likable and comically annoying as well as poignant and fundamentally sympathetic. 

Ernest P. Worrell is all of us. We are all Ernest P. Worrell. Unfortunately the off-brand Ernest P. Worrell here is pathetic and abused where he should be poignant and resilient and weirdly unlikable even when he’s not supposed to be. In Slam Dunk Ernest, the titular man of the people is a sad sack whose tragic plight inspires mostly pity.

He’ll do anything to fit in but his disconcertingly business and success-minded colleagues treat him with disconcerting callousness. They call him a cracker and a redneck. They pour lemonade on his head. They beat him up. They berate him. 

This coldness and casual cruelty has a boomerang effect that renders the other main characters in the film unlikable  as well as Ernest. Ernest’s teammates are a bunch of jive-talking jerks who bully Ernest because they can and because this incarnation of the character is, honestly, a little annoying. 

I never thought I would write these heretical words but Ernst comes off as a bit of an idiot here and is, to be brutally candid, not hilarious either. 

Ernest’s dreams of basketball greatness seem doomed to go unrealized until the Arc-Angel of Basketball (Kareem-Abdul Jabbar) gives him a magical pair of 250 dollar anthropomorphic shoes that grant him superhuman abilities. 

Ernest goes from zero to hero overnight, from habitually maligned bench-warmer to NBA contender and he owes it all to shoes that allow him to do things literally no other human being has ever done since the beginning of time, like leap twenty five feet in the air and stay there for forty seconds. 

Slam Dunk Ernest suffers from an unmistakable element of self-cannibalization. It is, after all, the second consecutive Ernest movie about an amiable dolt who acquires superhuman abilities and turns into an arrogant, narcissistic jerk. 

Literally and figuratively Kareem Abdul-Jabbar looks up to Ernest P. Worrell

In Ernest Goes to School Ernest gets hooked up to a brain enhancement machine that made him super smart and a football wiz. In Slam Dunk Ernest he gets magical shoes from an angel and becomes the greatest athlete the world has ever known. 

Ernest is an inherently likable character yet Ernest Goes to School and Slam Dunk Ernest are nevertheless in a perverse hurry to turn him into an arrogant asshole who thinks the world revolves around him and his greatness. 

Ah, but Ernest isn’t just the world’s greatest athlete. He’s also a pawn in an eternal game of good versus evil. God takes an interest in Ernest but so does Mr. Zamiel Moloch (Jay Brazeau), AKA the Devil. 

The Great Deceiver corrupts innocent Ernest by giving him the power and status he has longed for his entire life and transforms Ernest’s crush Miss Erma Terradiddle (Stevie Vallance) from a cheerful geek into a tawdry seductress. 

In a fascinatingly out of place subplot that takes up way too much time when it should have been left on the cutting room floor, Barry Worth (Cylk Cozart), the leader of the Clean Sweep basketball team and the owner of the business, must deal with his impressionable son Quincy’s disappointment that his father has a blue collar job instead of doing something more glamorous and high-paying, like being an NBA player. 

This subplot is played entirely straight. It’s a weirdly earnest blast of A Raisin in the Sun in what is otherwise a goofy fantasy about a hillbilly whose ability to literally fly through the air like a majestic bird makes him a contender for NBA stardom but not, inexplicably, a subject of serious scientific inquiry to determine what makes Ernest different from everyone who can’t fly. 

Mr. Zamiel Moloch wants to corrupt Quincy through Ernest and the magical shoes but God is good and Ernest eventually learns his lesson and forsakes Satanic basketball magic in favor of good old fashioned hard work. 

Slam Dunk Ernest is undoubtedly well-intentioned but its message that black children should stay in school so that they don’t end up being a janitor like their dad is condescending at best and kind of racist at worst. 

Slam Dunk Ernest contains way more Ebonics than is at all proper or appropriate for a redneck hero like Ernest P. Worrell. It’s too silly and too sentimental and largely devoid of laughs and memorable gags or set-pieces. 

Ernest P. Worrell’s seventh outing as a leading man is quite poor and I say that as a fan. They can’t all be winners, and Slam Dunk Ernest, alas, is a real loser.