A few months back I picked up a copy of Ernest Goes to Camp and reviewed it here, as one of the many movies of the 1980s that I couldn’t quite remember seeing. That movie came on a cheap DVD three-pack, which meant that there were a couple other Ernest P. Worrell films to get to eventually. Looking at the films, I decided to space them out about three months apart — the third is a Halloween film so it should be seen in October — and so it has now come time to watch and review 1990′s Ernest Goes to Jail. Although it’s the second Ernest film I’ve seen, it’s technically the third in the series — the second being Ernest Saves Christmas — but I figured that the Ernest series was unlikely to have an in-depth continuity that needed to be followed.
There do, however, seem to be some constants in the Ernest films. Besides Jim Varney as the title character, the films all seem to be directed by John R. Cherry III, and at least in the first few films, Gailard Sartain plays a bumbling friend of Ernest with an interest in inventions. In this case, however, he’s a different character than in “Camp”, playing Chuck, one of two security guards at the bank. The other, Bobby, is played by Bill Byrge, who never speaks a word but mugs for the camera even more than Varney himself does. Continue reading
