Movie Review – Ernest Goes to School

Ernest Goes to School (1994)
Written by Coke Sams and Bruce Arntson
Directed by Coke Sams

Amidst a sea of mediocrity (and trust me, it gets so bad with the last two films), Ernest Goes to School emerged as a decent watch. Part of this is likely because it’s the only Ernest film that was not directed or written by John Cherry. Instead, Cherry’s longtime writing collaborator, Coke Sams, was promoted to the lead position. The result is a film that resembles the previous films but adds some new ideas that Sams must have had rattling around for a while. The problem, though, is that Goes to School is two scripts that have unsuccessfully mashed together. There’s a script about Ernest playing football and one about him returning to high school. 

Once again, Ernest (Jim Varney) is a custodian. This time, he is working at Chickasaw Falls High School. The school board has decided to merge with a neighboring district, which means closures and firings. A new rule has been added that all district employees must have, at minimum, a high school diploma. It turns out Ernest never graduated. So our hero must retake the 12th grade, leading to all sorts of hijinks. He struggles, which leads Ernest to turn to the school’s two science teachers (Linda Kash and Bill Byrge), who have built an experimental brain accelerator. Bet you can see where this is going.

Not only do we get Poindexter Ernest, an excellent chance for Varney to flex his acting chops beyond the standard Ernest schtick, but we also have Ernest getting a love interest in Mrs. Flugal, the music teacher (A bad idea, Ernest and love interests never work in these films). Then there’s the need for the school to win the football championships, and Ernest has to join the team because his smarts make him a great strategist. Plus, the school bullies who tormented our protagonist as a janitor get even worse when he becomes a student. Do you see what I mean when I say there is way too much in this movie when you compare it to previous Ernest pictures?

This was the last theatrically released Ernest film, and even then, it was a limited release. Only two theaters, one in Cincinnati and the other in Louisville, showed the picture on the big screen. Most of us saw it as a VHS release. 

It was also Bill Byrge’s final appearance in the series. Without Chuck, keeping Bobby around always felt awkward, so I can’t say I was sad to see him go, especially with how bad the last two were. This time, he’s paired with Linda Kash, who played Nan in Rides Again. Kash is a Canadian actor who worked in Second City. She was likely a local hire as the production was in Vancouver. The two work well together as the school’s scientific duo. Byrge plays it mostly silently, but he is a different character than Bobby.

The main thing that makes this watchable is Varney playing a brainy version of Ernest. He’s an entirely different character and much more of an asshole than Ernest typically is. That’s part of the joke that we prefer dumb & nice Ernest over this stuck-up jerk. Rides Again shifted Ernest into more cartoonish, but I found Goes to School the most exaggerated part of the series. If you were tired of seeing plain ol’ Ernest, you’d at least get something different, and that makes it comparatively better than most of them. 

Yet, having Ernest go back to school isn’t a novel idea. The “back to school” premise has been and continues to be well-trod territory. Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 Back to School is one of the main pieces in the genre. This does pre-date Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison by a year, so we have to ask, were Sandler and company ripping off Ernest? I mean, Ernest was such a trendsetter, right? 

I kid. This film was released the same year as The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the few feature films where Varney plays a lead role that isn’t Ernest. In that film, he plays the straight man, letting actors like Cloris Leachman and Diedrich Bader bounce off him. Varney remarked at the time that it was a refreshing change of pace. He was able to showcase other acting abilities to a wide-release audience and play someone totally different than Ernest. Ernest is the Southern fool, while Jed Clampett is the Southern sage. 

In Goes to School, we get something similar: Varney plays a version of Ernest that isn’t so popular but intimidating. That’s an adjective you would never think to apply to regular ol’ Ernest, but this brainy version is meant to be a pompous bully of a certain kind. In many ways, this plays to the American conservative stereotypes about intellectuals.

Before Pureflix, there was Ernest, and I sometimes think if Varney was still alive today, Ernest’s films would be distributed through that “family-friendly” producer. I do wonder if Varney would have been a Trump supporter. I would hope that he wouldn’t be based on his love of the theater, but there are a lot of Hollywood types who never became wildly successful or fell off in recent years and have become disgruntled reactionaries (see Scott Baio, Kevin Sorbo, Dean Cain, Jon Voigt, etc.).

Next up in our review series is the worst of them all, Ernest Goes to Africa, which will bring up some problematic elements.