Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #129 Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Patrons have also been using this column to make me watch seminal milestones of cinema, important works of art like Manos: The Hands of Fate, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Troll 2 and now Ernest Goes to Camp, the maiden entry in an infamous series of motion pictures devoted to the frantic mugging of country-fried clown Ernest P. Worrell, the good-hearted buffoon Jim Varney made a household name and enduring icon of American stupidity and bad taste. 

1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp was released just two years after Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure illustrated the limitless creative and commercial potential of a modestly budgeted cinematic vehicle for a pre-existing kooky character with a colorful way of dressing and expressing himself. 

I’m not sure the character of cornpone cut-up Ernest P. Worrell was ever fresh and not a shameless rip-off of Ernest T. Bass, a similarly monikered buffoon from The Andy Griffith Show. But Ernest was as fresh as he was ever going to be in Ernest Goes to Camp. 

Ernest was not a joke when Ernest Goes to Camp became a sleeper hit, grossing over twenty million dollars on a three million dollar budget. He had not become synonymous with lowbrow idiocy 

When Varney, as Ernest, mumbled “KnowwhutImean?” for the first time on camera it was as revolutionary and zeitgeist-changing as when Al Jolson famously said, “Check out this cool shit!” to kick off the sound era in The Jazz Singer. 

In Ernest Goes to Camp, Jim Varney plays Ernest P. Worrell, a good-hearted but comically incompetent handyman at Kamp Kikakee who dreams of making the big jump to counselor but is held back by having the same mental age as many of its younger campers.

Everyone looks down on Ernest as a lower life form until a group of juvenile delinquents known as the Second Chancers descend upon the camp to wreak joyous anarchy.

Everybody hates the Second Chancers because they’re poor and don’t live with their parents and inexplicably dress like a New Wave band that just got back from shooting the cover for their debut album. 

One young ruffian sports a tie with a tee shirt and button-festooned vest, the perfect outfit for Summer fun. Another has suspenders for some reason. Still another alternates between half shirts and buttoned-down shirts un-buttoned to reveal lots of soft white belly. 

The snobbiest, most experienced counselor, Ross Stennis (Eddy Schumacher) tosses a small boy he knows cannot swim into the water to die a watery death but Ernest saves his life and is rewarded with a job as counselor. 

Evil mining executive Sherman Krader (John Vernon, absolutely killing in the John Vernon role of the head snob) meanwhile, plots to steal the camp’s land because a valuable imaginary mineral known as petrocite has been found there. 

All that stands in his way is stubborn yet wise Native American Old Indian Chief St. Cloud. Chief McCloud is played by Iron Eyes Cody, a prominent character actor who would be revered as a groundbreaking Native American thespian, perhaps best known as the weeping Indian in a series of anti-littering commercials and advertisements in the early 1970s, were it not for the inconvenient fact that Cody wasn’t Native American at all, but rather an Italian-American who kept his real ethnicity a secret so he could continue to take roles from actual Native Americans. 

Ernest Goes to Camp serves as a potent reminder that what passes as “summer camp culture” is really just a clumsy, shameless appropriation of Native American mythology. 

Chief McCloud and his doctor granddaughter are the final members of a tribe absolutely decimated by genocide but the wise Native American chief sees the snotty-ass white kids building teepees and making headdresses and totem poles and calling each other “braves” as noble souls keeping the Native American spirit alive.

Late in the film the Chief puts war paint on the Second Chancers as they prepare to do battle with the evil miners/land developers, essentially deputizing them all as Fake Native American warriors for the big climactic skirmish.

The Second Chancers build a teepee for a competition, only to watch it go down in flames. Ernest and his motley band of ne’er do wells find themselves fighting a two-front war against snobby campers and counselors on one side and Sherman’s villainous minions on the other that necessitates all manner of inspirational montages set to thematically appropriate power ballads in what could possibly be the single most 1980s movie ever made. 

That Ernest Goes to Camp is even watchable is largely a testament to Jim Varney’s tremendous talent. Varney is the whole package, a rubber-faced, wildly expressive physical comedian who is also tremendously likable and endearing even at his most annoying. 

You incongruously have to be incredibly charming to make audiences love a character as deliberately irritating as Ernest. But it goes beyond that. Varney lends the character tremendous pathos as well. 

There’s an extraordinary sequence in the film’s third act when it seems like all is lost and the camp will soon be in the hands of pure evil when Varney, as Ernest, sings a song. An ENTIRE song. Like in a musical! Only Ernest Goes to Camp is no musical, only a weirdly ambitious comedy where original music plays an unexpectedly central role. 

Bear in mind that the song Ernest sings is not a silly ditty or a goofball comedy song but rather a tremblingly earnest (no pun intended) ballad about sadness and hope called “Gee I'm Glad It's Raining.”

This should be an INCREDIBLY embarrassing, tone-deaf moment. This is an Ernest movie, after all, not an Arthur Freed song and dance-packed extravaganza. Instead the song succeeds smashingly because there’s a core of genuine melancholy underneath the goofball antics, an exuberant sweetness that’s hard to resist. 

But Ernest didn’t just move me with his sorrowful crooning: he also made me laugh and question his ethics and political beliefs. 

When a terrified and trembling Ernest is given a shot with a huge needle by the Chief’s doctor granddaughter early in the film, it causes him to reflexively scream out in pain and horror, “I took the Lindberg baby! I’m Josef Mengele!” 

The sheer surprise of hearing the words “I’m Josef Mengele” emerge from the panicked mouth of Ernest P. Worrell made me laugh out loud. But it also changed the way I think about the character. 

If Ernest IS in fact Nazi Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s  notorious “Angel of Death”, (and he does not, at any point in the film say that he misspoke when he proclaimed himself a brutal butcher of the Fourth Reich), then that makes his character considerably less sympathetic. 

I’m rooting for Ernest to beat the greedy miners out to steal the camp from the wise old Native American chief but not if he was an enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust. 

In the end, Ernest is so likable and funny and fresh that I one hundred percent don’t think he’s Josef Mengele, not even a little bit. 

Ernest Goes to Camp pleasantly surprised me. I came in with the lowest possible expectations and was thoroughly entertained by the film’s aggressively non-ironic embrace of some of my favorite 1980s cheeseball cliches involving rival camps, the eternal battle of the slobs versus snobs and of course greedy developers trying to steal resource-rich land from lovable underdogs. If you only watch one Ernest movie, I’m guessing this is the one to go with. 

I feel like I can finally say conclusively that I DO know what you mean, Ernest. I know EXACTLY what you mean, you hillbilly angel, you redneck seraph, and it’s so goddamn beautiful and pure that it makes me want to cry.

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