The Importance of Being Ernest Part 2: Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)

Ernest teams up with a most atypical Saint Nick in a gloriously off-brand Christmas comedy that doubles as a cockeyed look at low-budget genre filmmaking.

When I first covered the 1988 sleeper hit Ernest Saves Christmas for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, the column on my website where readers choose movies for me to watch and write about for a modest price, I remember being wonderfully surprised by it. 

I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the film. It was the one that turned me into a true believer, an unabashed Ernest P. Worrell fan, an enthusiastic appreciator of the only true genius this country has ever produced. 

But I was also surprised by LOTS of individual choices the film made, primarily in terms of its depiction of Santa Claus. Most movies about Kris Kringle understandably depict him as hyper-efficient. 

He has an AWFULLY big operation to run, after all, and a very narrow window—a single late December evening—to unload an insane amount of inventory to a broad and diverse customer base. 

So Santa Claus is traditionally depicted as someone who has his shit together and can be trusted to literally accomplish super-human feats. He’s the ultimate manager and the best employee any organization could hope for. 

That’s not the Santa Claus of Ernest Saves Christmas, fascinatingly enough. The cult comedy’s unique take on Saint Nick is a lovely human being, a Prince of a Man, really. He’s the literal personification of Christmas magic. 

But he does NOT have his shit together. He’s easily confused. He possesses God-like omniscience yet he mistakes play money for the real thing. He loses prized possessions like the magic sack that is the key to so many of his powers at an alarming rate.

Father Christmas is disturbingly reliant upon the problem-solving and quick thinking of noted dullard Ernest P. Worrell. When the kindly toy baron tells people that he’s Santa Claus and they look at him like he’s insane they don’t seem entirely wrong in that estimation. 

Unlike pretty much ALL other versions of the iconic gift-giver, this Santa Claus flies commercial and loses his flying reindeer along with everything else. In a glaring case of poor judgment, the absent-minded Yuletide titan needs to hand over the torch to a new Santa Claus by seven o’ clock but doesn’t even begin the process of trying to convince his choice, soft-hearted children’s entertainer Joe Carruthers (Oliver Clark) to take the gig until that afternoon.

That’s NOWHERE near enough time! What was he thinking!?! It’s probably a good thing he’s giving up the gig because he’s undeniably losing it. 

Santa Claus’ tragic inability to cope with the complexities and demands of our crazy-making modern world lands him in prison, not unlike Ernest himself in the film that would follow, 1990’s Ernest Goes to Jail. 

I’m sure there are drafts of Ernest Saves Christmas where Santa Claus gets shanked with a sharpened candy cane or agrees to become someone’s prison bitch in exchange for protection but this keeps things PG. 

Ernest Saves Christmas’ Santa Claus is merely mesmerizingly off-brand yet somehow still true to the sentimental, twinkly spirit of the season, not a brutalized victim of our nation’s prison-industrial complex. 

On the contrary, when he thinks that Christmas is being disrespected or over-commercialized, this renegade Kris Kringle isn’t afraid to throw hands and beat a non-believing motherfucker up. 

Ernest Saves Christmas is so filled with surprises and wonderfully daft choices that I forgot some pretty huge ones. 

For example I forgot that Ernest Saves Christmas is a movie about the filmmaking industry and I am writing a massive book about the history of movies about movies. 

Despite my obsession with this juiciest of subjects, I didn’t recall that the dynamic duo of Ernest P. Worrell, good-natured idiot, and Santa Claus, senile bumbler, save Christmas by sabotaging the Orlando-based production of a Christmas-themed horror movie by stealing its lead actor. 

Being set in the sweltering heat and pounding sun of Orlando, Florida somehow did not keep Ernest Saves Christmas from being about a holiday synonymous with snow and cold weather. Why should it keep Ernest Saves Christmas from being about the movie business as well just because it takes place thousands of miles away from Hollywood? 

In Ernest Saves Christmas the fate of Christmas for eternity hinges on outcasts cruelly depriving a sleazy Florida film production of crucial personnel deep into the production process. 

Ernest Saves Christmas is a film of surprises, beginning with its slender, senile, soon to be imprisoned Santa arriving in Orlando, Florida via a commercial airline and promptly forgetting his magical sack in the taxicab of good-hearted goof Ernest P. Worrell. 

Giving the seemingly deluded old man a lift gets Ernest fired on Christmas Eve. Santa, meanwhile, ends up in prison for vagrancy. At first it looks like the massive, menacing prisoners will beat the old man to a pulp but they’re not immune to the Christmas spirit. The magical old man with the twinkle in his eyes transforms these junkyard dogs into well-mannered puppies overcome with appreciation for the season’s gifts, only some of which are literal. 

One of the great joys of watching this most auspicious of film series comes from seeing Varney stretch his formidable talents by playing different kinds of characters. 

In Ernest Goes to Jail that’s accomplished by having Varney play a dual role as both the hero and villain. In Ernest Saves Christmas, Ernest is an unlikely master of disguise and dialects, just like the actor playing him and also Dana Carvey’s iconic Pistachio Disguisey’s in 2002’s Master of Disguise. 

Ernest Poindexters up to play a sniveling sycophant of the governor in order to get Santa Claus sprung from the hoosegow. Like Bugs Bunny before him, Ernest dresses in drag as at the slightest provocation. 

The Ernest franchise understood that silly men dressing up in women’s clothing was one of the unassailable bedrocks of comedy. It’s as American as mom, baseball, apple pie and Milton Berle’s enormous penis. 

In order to get into a studio lot where Christmas Slay is being filmed on Christmas Eve, with a cast of traumatized children, Ernest pretends to be a snake wrangler who has been dealing with snakes for so long that he himself seems to have de-evolved into a feral, sub-human state.

Varney’s Ernest is a gleeful hurricane of destruction happily oblivious to the mayhem he leaves in his wake. There’s a bravura physical comedy set-piece where Ernest visits his forever unseen acquaintance Vern’s home and accidentally but absolutely trashes it with an idiot grin on his face the whole time. 

Santa Claus has traveled to Florida to convince actor Joe Carruthers, the longtime host of a longtime children’s show about the importance of manners, to accept the existential burden of taking over the ultimate hardest job you’ll ever love but the middle aged man is finding it hard to say no to a lead role in a feature film entitled Christmas Slay, albeit one that can hardly be called a major motion picture. 

There’s nothing children like more than movies about weird, seemingly childless yet child-obsessed men of a certain age at a personal and professional crossroads who must choose between late in the game movie stardom and becoming an ageless figure of Christian mythology. 

The only possible exception are stories about succession, how a job or position changes hands after someone retires or moves on. 

For a Christmas movie about kiddie favorites Ernest P. Worrell and Santa Claus, Ernest Saves Christmas is curiously light on actual children though it does have a troubled teenaged hero in Pamela Trenton / Harmony Starr (Noelle Parker), a runaway who steals Santa’s magic sack with hopes of untold wealth and riches and comes to regret stealing from a magical being who literally embodies goodness, generosity and the Christmas spirit. 

Ernest Saves Christmas is an atypical Christmas movie but it ends on a traditional note with Ernest commandeering a magical flying sleigh that has been conspicuously absent all film long and the new appointee Santa Claus happily accepting his new gig, leaving the schlockmeisters behind Christmas Slay without a lead actor. 

That doesn’t seem very compassionate to me but then Ernest and Santa clearly care more about Christmas than they do Christmas Slay’s bottom line. 

Ernest Saves Christmas marks a distinct improvement over Ernest’s wildly over-achieving debut. It’s unusual Christmas fare that nevertheless delivers the holiday goods in abundance. 

It’s daffy and likable and sweet and sincere without feeling cloying or maudlin. Critics and intellectuals might not have appreciated or understood Ernest. When they looked at him decked out in denim they saw only a fool and an idiot, not a hero willing to debase himself for the greater good, for our delight and enjoyment. 

The people understood, however, and Ernest Saves Christmas was both a sizable hit and a beloved Christmas classic, the kind of movie you can watch over and over and over and over and over again and find new things to dig each time around. 

Incidentally, this post was originally only for paid subscribers only. I REALLY want to provide an inducement for subscribers to pony up what I think is a very reasonable amount per month (five dollars) but I also want y’all to have access to my pieces as well so I think what I am going to do is post these articles for free a day or two after I send them to paid subscribers. Will that work? Probably not but it’s worth a shot!