Ernest Goes to Camp (dir. John R. Cherry III, 1987)
The story in brief: Ernest is assigned to be a counselor to a group of benignly evil young campers, shipped over from Juvenile Hall. He is mocked by the campers, but wants to prove his mettle as a real counselor. Eventually he and the campers will have to butt heads with – and even do warlike battle with – an evil developer (John Vernon) who wants to bulldoze the camp (located on an Indian reservation) and build some evil monstrosity. This upsets not only the campers, but the camp’s aged Indian guide (Iron Eyes Cody) who occasionally gives speeches about bonding with the land.
The comedy in the film stems from Ernest’s eagerness to please, and his inevitable slapstick failure. Ernest is a pure-hearted fellow, and never wants to cheat, lie, or steal. He just sucks at everything he tries. I think we can all relate to that in a way, but that doesn’t mean watching Ernest’s childish pratfalls doesn’t get old really quickly. Ernest’s need to please – and constant failure – even leads to one of the most bizarre incidents in all of the Ernest movies: Ernest sings a tender and maudlin song about failing. It’s a moody moment in a film that banks on slapstick. Weird.
A bit I liked, despite myself: The camp’s chefs (Gailard Sartain and Daniel Butler), in order to live up to the widely-perceived notion that camp chefs are all terrible cooks, have invented a machine that can synthesize any number of foods (and non-food items) into horrible-tasting homogenous mush. It fired great globs of nasty food substance out of a cannon. I don’t know why this amused me as much as it did.
This needs to be said: Ernest Goes to Camp was made for $3 million. It made over $23 million. That’s 7.6 times its budget. These films made a lot of money. This is why there were so many of them, despite constant critical dogging, and a general pop culture mockery of the character.
Ernest is also The Chosen One, by the way. At the film’s end, after he and the JD kids have banded together to make food cannons and parachuting snapping turtles into weapons of war (yes, there is a war against the encroaching developers), Ernest is shot point blank. As elucidated in an earlier Indian folk tale, however, Ernest is protected from the bullets through his purity of spirit. This is a wrinkle we don’t usually get in comedies that bank on the antisocial behavior of lovable doofuses. Ace Ventura could not be declared pure of heart. Anyone Will Farrell plays would never be seen as a spiritual exemplar. Maybe that’s what sets Ernest apart from other “wacky character” comedies. He’s scrupulously honest and decent, despite his idiocy.
He’s so honest, in fact, that he can play Santa Claus as seen in…
