Movie Review – Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam (1985)
Written by John Cherry and Coke Sams
Directed by John Cherry

Jim Varney had made a solid go of it in Los Angeles. He’d been a regular & recurring cast member on multiple nationally broadcast shows by the end of the 1970s. A cast member of Johnny Cash & Friends, a recurring role as a sleazy used car salesman on Norman Lear’s Fernwood2Nite, and even in the cast of the notorious Pink Lady and Jeff. He was married to Jacqui, his first wife, and was helping to raise her two sons. But things weren’t going well in L.A., so Varney returned to his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. His big dream was to star on Broadway, which was a challenging goal. 

Through the 1970s, Varney would do commercial spots for Carden and Cherry, a Nashville-based advertising company that specialized in regional ads. The actor had played Sergeant Glory, a humorless drill instructor whose dry delivery was juxtaposed with comedy situations. Everyone involved thought a new character was needed, and they fashioned Ernest P. Worrell. Ernest was inspired by various people in Varney, Cherry, and other’s lives, all typically annoying neighbors or know-it-all relatives. The first ad Ernest appeared in was for Beech Bend Park, an amusement park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, that Cherry didn’t think was that impressive. He opted to shoot the ad at his own home in Nashville rather than at the park. 

And thus was born a 1980s icon. That decade seemed to be an excellent time for “weird little guys,” with Ernest coming to prominence alongside Pee-Wee Herman, Mr. Bean, and Weird Al, to name a few. Ernest’s appeal was that his ads were specific to regional markets, leading viewers to assume he was local to where they lived. Varney was also a genuinely hilarious physical comedian and employed that in the ads through some camera trickery. The commercials weren’t like anything else and would become a style that would bear lots of fruit in the 1990s. Think of how many “extreme” style ads used many of the visual elements in the Ernest ads. 

By the mid-1980s, Varney was well-known for his Ernest role, making public appearances as the character. Cherry and Carden were selling Ernest branded merchandise, including VHS tapes of the ads themselves. Varney wanted to showcase his other characters and acting skills, while Cherry had always aspired to make a feature film. Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam was born, a mish-mash of both men’s styles and a showcase for Varney’s list of characters and accents. Ernest was used to sell the picture, with a teased appearance on the poster and VHS box, while it was just a cameo at the film’s end.

Dr. Otto (Varney) is a mutated supervillain who has built a “gloom beam,” an electromagnetic device that can erase banks’ entire holdings to create worldwide chaos. He hits Cincinnati, Ohio, first as a test to the public. A bank hires all-American golden boy Lance Sterling (Myke Muller) and his sidekick Doris (Jackie Welch) to find Dr. Otto and stop him. The hero & the villain are parallels, born on the same day but to very different parents and raised to become highly different people. To throw Sterling off the trail, Dr. Otto employs his changing coffin, transforming him into a new identity (all played by Varney). There’s Australian militant Rudd Hardtack, wealthy playboy Guy Dandy, the pirate Laughing Jack O’Cockney, and the cantankerous Auntie Nelda. 

For a leading man, Varney never really played the types of characters we might expect. His villains were always parodies, and his heroes were often softer and more sensitive than in most films. Lance Sterling is an interesting character in Cherry’s filmography as he’s a parody of all those things we grow up being told are virtuous and good. In later Ernest pictures, there’s an emphasis on wholesomeness, and while this isn’t all that edgy (it got a P.G. rating), it definitely is meaner than what you might expect from Varney and company.

I got the sense that John Cherry was a big fan of Monty Python and especially Terry Gilliam’s work. Time Bandits clearly had an influence on the look of Dr. Otto, who resembles David Warner’s Evil in that film. This film feels like something made by fans of Monty Python, but not something of the same level of quality as that comedy troupe was producing. The jokes here are mostly puns or thinking that the voice Varney is doing is hilarious. Did I laugh while watching this movie? Nope, not once. 

Watching this film at the age of 43 fulfilled a lifelong curiosity that began when I was a boy in the 1990s walking through the video rental store and coming across Ernest on a VHS box for a movie I’d never heard of. I didn’t miss out on anything by not seeing this until now. The thing about the plot is it bears a lot of similarities to Fight Club. Dual personalities and a bid to destroy the financial systems stood out to me. That would make for a hell of a double feature. 

The biggest problem with Dr. Otto is that it is so painfully unfocused. Everything that happens between Varney switching characters feels like filler. Two years prior, Varney and Cherry had made Hey Vern, It’s My Family Album, a syndicated TV special where the actor played many of these characters and more as a glorified reel to casting agents. Cherry was still in a very commercial structure mindset, so Otto plays like small chunks mashed together and never really feels coherent. It came out the same year as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventures, and the two are perfect opposites, with Pee-Wee feeling like a cohesive story with stops along the way while Otto is all over the place. 

This will be the first of several stops along our July series Ernest Saves the Summer. We’re going to look at the life and work of Jim Varney as Ernest. He was a far more complex person than many realize, and his films were a big part of my childhood. His way too-early death from cancer at age 50 took away a performer who still had tremendous work left in him.