The Importance of Being Ernest Part 5: Ernest Rides Again (1993)

The Ernest Renaissance is over, y'all!

Every Golden Age has to end. Every heyday has to come to a close eventually. Nothing gold can stay.

For Jim Varney, Ernest P. Worrell’s legendary winning streak came to an abrupt end with 1993’s Ernest Rides Again, his first movie post-Touchstone and his final film to receive a major national release. 

The next Ernest movie, 1994’s Ernest Goes to School, was theatrically released in just two lucky cities: Cincinnati and Louisville. Varney’s subsequent three vehicles, 1995’s Slam Dunk Ernest, 1997’s Ernest Goes to Africa and 1998’s Ernest Goes to Africa, all went direct to video. 

Then Jim Varney died in 2000 at the age of fifty-one of Lung Cancer before he could bless the world with any more Ernest movies. By that point, unfortunately, the series had been in decline for a half-decade. 

The problems with Ernest Rides Again begin with its title. Ernest’s Touchstone movies all had titles that told you EXACTLY what you were in for. The title of 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp let audiences know that the commercial world’s preeminent affable idiot had made the leap to the big screen with a slobs versus snobs Summer camp movie. 

1988’s Ernest Saves Christmas, meanwhile, none too subtly broadcast that Ernest’s second big cinematic vehicle was one of those holiday classics where a lovable goober keeps Christmas from being cancelled. 

1990’s Ernest Goes to Jail was a lighthearted prison movie while 1991’s Ernest Scared Stupid found Ernest getting into the Halloween spirit with a delightfully traumatizing horror-comedy.

Ernest’s classic Touchstone vehicles all found the irrepressible son of the South in a clearly delineated, richly conceived cultural milieu. That unfortunately is not true of his first real flop, 1993’s Ernest Rides Again. 

Ernest Rides Again’s title is maddeningly vague. It says NOTHING about the film’s contents. That might be good since the marketing wizards behind the movie inexplicably chose to focus on subjects of zero interest to Ernest’s fanbase of small child and easily amused adults like myself: academic competition, valuable artifacts and the Revolutionary War. 

That’s not a terrible commercial subject for a children’s film and Ernest’s country-fried shenanigans famously failed to catch on with intelligentsia and the smart set. This may be hard to believe, but not a single Ernest movies has been deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant enough to qualify for preservation by the National Film Registry. 

Not even Ernest Goes to Camp. 

As its title frustratingly fails to suggest, Ernest Rides Again finds sweet-natured redneck Ernest P. Worrell working as a janitor at a college. In an early set-piece that promises more than the film ultimately delivers, an electric saw that Ernest is using seemingly attains sentience and develops a nasty, murderous attitude towards him. 

For a few agreeably insane minutes Ernest Rides Again turns into a hillbilly version of Maximum Overdrive as the tools of Ernest’s trade turn dramatically and defiantly against him and try to wreak bloody vengeance. 

Ernest is understandably both confused and terrified. “I’m not your enemy! Some of my best friends are power tools!” Ernest attempts to assure the blood-thirsty, power-mad power tool.

In Ernest’s surreal world, even inanimate objects have it in for him. Life never stops defecating explosively in Ernest’s mouth yet he never loses his positive attitude, innate sweetness or belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature. 

It’s a standout physical comedy set-piece and a wonderful showcase for Varney’s prodigious gifts but it also feels an awful lot like the scene in Ernest Goes to Jail where Ernest is terrorized by metal objects that chase him up a wall and defy all laws of physics and gravity in their mad pursuit. Even at its best, Ernest Rides Again finds the filmmakers engaging in blatant self-cannibalization. 

Ernest doesn’t have much going for him beyond a decidedly one-sided friendship with nerdy professor Dr. Abner Melon (Ron James). Ernest thinks of himself as Melon’s dear friend and trusted professional peer. Melon, meanwhile, sees Ernest as an annoyance he neither wants nor needs. 

The central role of a geeky academic with a domineering wife and hostile professional colleagues cries out angrily for the raw, sweaty magnetism of Eddie Deezen, the big dick energy of Curtis Armstrong or the monster swag of Tim Kazurinsky. 

In order for Ernest Rides Again to work as a buddy comedy you need to pair Ernest with a strong sidekick/comic foil but James leaves a charisma and humor vacuum in a lead role. Ernest is perhaps our greatest icon but journeyman Canadian stand-up comedian Ron James is, regrettably, just some guy. 

When Ernest finds a mysterious old metal plate he brings it to Dr. Melon, who sees it as proof that the Crown Jewels are hidden inside a massive Revolutionary War cannon known as Goliath and what are ostensibly the Crown Jewels in England are nothing more than a fake. 

Dr. Melon’s colleagues write him off as a crackpot and a conspiracy theorist for his beliefs but Ernest believes in him AND his crazy ideas, just as he unfortunately would probably believe conspiracy theories involving QAnon if he were making movies today. 

I can only imagine how disturbing a contemporary Ernest P. Worrell movie would be with its no longer harmless hero excitingly telling his friend Verne about some things he just learned on his computer about celebrities and their insatiable addiction to Adrenochrome and how Joe Biden is actually a clone. 

So it is perhaps a good thing that fate spared us 2021’s Ernest Goes Full-On QAnon.

Dr. Melon’s ideas are kooky and off the wall but they’re not treasonous or dangerous. He is nevertheless an object of sneering derision at the college where he teaches before Ernest’s discoveries suggest that the nutty professor was right all along. 

The low-wattage comedy team of Ernest P. Worrell and Dr. Abner Melon finds the Crown Jewels hidden inside an antiquated weapon. Feverish competition ensues as the daffy duo tries to stay one step ahead of both a big time professor who wants to get his hands on the impossibly valuable artifacts and the British government, which wants to suppress news that the real Crown Jewels have been hidden inside a cannon in the United States for hundreds of years, not unlike how the Biden administration is trying to suppress news that all of the top athletes are dying horrible deaths due to receiving to the COVID vaccine. 

That’s way too much plot for an Ernest movie. It’s also way too stupid a premise for an Ernest movie yet also somehow not stupid enough. 

I chuckled a few times during Ernest Rides Again. It’s intermittently amusing but unlike the vehicles that preceded it, I would not say that it’s funny. I also would not recommend it unconditionally to literally everyone in the world the way I would Ernest’s previous masterworks of cinema. 

Ernest Rides Again closes by teasing its hero’s next adventure, Ernest Goes to School, but his words inspired mild dread instead of feverish excitement. 

It pains me to write this, but after Ernest Rides Again, I know no longer know what Ernest means. That beautiful emotional and spiritual connection has been lost. 

And, if my fuzzy memories of Slam Dunk Ernest are any indication, it’s only going to get worse, and more racially problematic from here, and that’s only partially because Ernest Goes to Africa lies ahead. 

Unlike Ernest Rides Again, Ernest Goes to Africa’s title conveys its contents all too well. If it’s anything like pretty much every American comedy set in Africa, ever, it will be clueless at best and extremely racist at worst.