My next festive freebie is infantile all-American Christmas comedy 1988’s Ernest Saves Christmas. I vaguely remember catching this one on TV as a kid, not long after the arrival of Sky TV into our family home unlocked the doorway to a treasure trove of weird and wonderful American movies we’d never heard of. I recall really enjoying this one as an undemanding eight-year-old and that’s probably the ideal audience for this movie. It’s silly. It’s clean humour with its heart in the right place, even if it’s pretty shoddily made.
Director John R. Cherry III made no less than nine Ernest adventures which were not exactly critically adored but were made on the cheap and scored big profits. Ernest’s Christmas adventure portrays Santa (Douglas Seale) as a befuddled nincompoop who doesn’t comprehend that telling every person you meet that you are Santa will probably get you locked up. And so, on his journey to Florida to pass the mantle onto an unsuspecting successor, this is precisely what happens, though not before he leaves his magic sack in the taxi cab of one Ernest P. Worrell (Jim Varney), all round American idiot and blue collar hero.
The ‘90s phenomenon of Ernest inevitably seemed a little odd to a Scottish outsider like myself. The character was the star of local Nashville advertising campaigns, before starring in big ads for things like Coca Cola, which probably explains the prevalence of images of Santa enjoying bottles of Coke in the film’s opening. The ads apparently always portrayed Ernest dressed in his blue vest and baseball cap, acting like a nitwit and being an annoyance to an unseen, unheard neighbour known only as ‘Vern’. He’d ramble on for a bit, flinging in his catch phrase “Know what I mean?”, seemingly oblivious to all the chaos and discomfort he’d caused. The ads must have been huge as Ernest got his own kids TV sitcom and a lot of movies out of it.
…Saves Christmas keeps reminding me of Dumb and Dumber, with Ernest completely ignorant to the trouble he causes with his silly antics on his quest to Save Christmas. It’s not a bad idea for a Christmas film, the joke being that Ernest is the absolute last guy Santa would enlist for this mission. The opening scene of Ernest’s reckless driving terrifying and endangering passengers and drivers alike is a good laugh, if cartoonishly excessive.
There’s plenty of slapstick silliness and misunderstandings with Santa winding up in jail and our hero doing his best to get him out. This gives Varney the opportunity to don various ‘crazy’ disguises and try out an array of wacky voices and mannerisms. It’s very grating at times but still slightly above average for a kids Christmas film.
Ernest Saves Christmas is no classic but it’s enjoyable enough because it doesn’t take itself seriously and any treacly sentiment is trampled to death by Varney’s madcap physical overacting and a headache-inducing kinetic editing style. It’s Christmassy and it’s free, so will do perfectly fine if there’s nothing else on.
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