1988's Ernest Saves Christmas Turned Me Into a Believer

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I just finished a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.

The “War on Christmas” nonsense FOX spouts every year is absurd for reasons that go above and beyond the Christmas season being so oppressive and overwhelming that you need to make a concerted effort to NOT celebrate a holiday ostensibly celebrating the birth of a Christian messiah on some level. 

I should know. I’m Jewish so I do not technically celebrate Christmas, what with me not believing in the divinity of Christ and all. But because I am an American, a consumer and someone who loves pop culture I am nonetheless overwhelmed with Yuletide detritus for literally months upon months: Christmas songs and Christmas specials and Christmas movies and Christmas decorations and the goddamn Elf on the Shelf. 

It’s oppressive, or at least it would be if I didn’t have a grudging fondness for Christmas bordering on affection. I’m such a goddamn Christmas consumer that I legitimately felt a little guilty that I’d hadn’t really done anything to celebrate Christmas this year. 

Name a more iconic duo!

Besides, you can’t be a friend in good standing of Alonso “Mr. Christmas” Duralde without watching at least one Yuletide-themed movie every year. To rectify this oversight and thank one of the kind folks who chose the Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 option  for the Kickstarter for my amazing, extremely purchasable new book The Joy of Trash I figured I would watch and write about the 1988 sleeper hit Ernest Saves Christmas. 

It’s taken me nearly twenty-five years as a professional pop culture writer and forty-five years as a resident of planet earth but I finally feel like I get Ernest P. Worrell. It’s a process that began with a surprisingly positive Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 write up on 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp. 

I ended that article by conceding, “I feel like I can finally say conclusively that I DO know what you mean, Ernest. I know EXACTLY what you mean, you hillbilly angel, you redneck seraph, and it’s so goddamn beautiful and pure that it makes me want to cry.”

My conversion into an Ernest Stan/Jim Varney super-fan continues with 1988’s Ernest Saves Christmas, an even better, even weirder vehicle for Jim Varney’s cornpone antics and affable shenanigans. 

I’ve always liked Jim Varney as an actor and comedic performer even as I have turned up my nose at his most legendary character as a rude vulgarian. Watching Ernest Saves Christmas, however, I found myself thinking things I’d never thought before. 

I’m talking thoughts like, “Is Jim Varney a legitimate comic genius?” and “I really liked the Ernest movie I just saw. I would definitely recommend it.” 

I decided to watch Ernest Saves Christmas because, as its title helpfully conveys, it is a Christmas movie starring Jim Varney as lovable goofball Ernest P. Worrell. What I dug about it is that it is an utterly off-brand Christmas movie, one that brazenly eschews pretty much cliche and convention of the Christmas movie with the exception of some of the ones involving a dude in a red costume flying around the world dispensing gifts. 

You know that unofficial list of things that have to be in every Christmas movie? Ernest Saves Christmas doesn’t care about any of that shit.

Santa figures prominently in Ernest Saves Christmas but he’s a far cry from Coca-Cola or Norman Rockwell’s Santa Claus. For starters, he is shockingly svelte for jolly old Saint Nick, skinny even. 

He’s not just skinny, he’s slight and while he cares about children and the true meaning of Christmas and whatnot he’s more concerned with finding a qualified successor so that he can retire in peace and finally start playing the field a little. 

That’s right: in a addition to being diminutive and slender, and perpetually clad in a rather debonair suit rather than his trademark garb, this Santa Claus is also single, and ready to mingle, with no Mrs. Claus up in the North Pole to cramp his style. 

Oh, and he spends all his time in Florida and flies commercial airlines instead of using his flying sleigh. Other than that, though, he’s exactly like the Kris Kringle we all know and love. 

In Ernest Saves Christmas, Santa Claus (Douglas Seale, a veteran character actor best known for voicing the Sultan in Aladdin) comes to Florida to offer the job of delivering gifts to children every Christmas Eve to children’s entertainer Joe Carruthers (Oliver Clark). 

In one of the many weird, dark choices that make this such an unexpected delight, Joe, an earnest, idealistic Mr. Rogers-like TV personality, must then choose between becoming Santa Claus in real life or a lead role in a hard-R rated Silent Night, Deadly Night -style Christmas bloodbath called Santa Slay.

Santa ends up in the backseat of a cab driven by Ernest P. Worrell, a pure-hearted man-child obsessed with Christmas. Santa, alas, is going senile, which is a big part of of the reason he wants to retire. 

Santa has only play money to pay Ernest with and when he tells his bosses that he gave a nice, possibly mentally ill man a free ride for Christmas, the now unemployed cabbie is fired for his generosity. Alas, Santa, being senile, left his magical sack in a taxicab Ernest no longer drives. 

People understandably have a hard time believing that the soon-to-be retiree is the Santa Claus so he ends up in jail in Florida. For a brief, horrifying moment, it seems entirely possible that Ernest Saves Christmas will throw in a “Santa getting sexually menaced in jail” joke for the awful adults in the audience. 

Thankfully Ernest Saves Christmas is above such crude and inappropriate humor. Instead of being “humorously” raped Santa instead instantly transforms the imprisoned into a merry choir of carolers. 

Then Santa’s magical sack (which sounds much more salacious than it actually is) ends up getting stolen by Pamela Trenton / Harmony Starr (Noelle Parker), a teen runaway with aspirations to stardom. 

It’s up to Ernest to save Christmas and reunite Santa with his flying reindeer, magical sack and flying sleigh. Ernest must employ any manner of disguises and fake identities in order to keep Christmas from getting cancelled. 

Deep into Ernest Saves Christmas Ernest, ever the good Samaritan, decides to gift a Christmas tree to Vern, his never-seen foil on television, film and commercials. 

Without meaning to, Ernest cavalierly destroys the man’s house, leaving a trail of utter destruction and devastation in his wake. It’s a bravura physical comedy set-piece rendered laugh out loud funny by Varney’s utter obliviousness as to the havoc he’s wreaking. 

It’s one of any number of inspired showcases for Varney’s extraordinary gifts as a fearless, rubber-faced, elastic-limbed physical comedian. 

When Ernest Saves Christmas became the character’s second sleeper hit Ernest had not yet wore out his welcome. He wasn’t a walking punchline yet. His shtick had not gotten stale. 

I was legitimately shocked at how much I enjoyed Ernest Saves Christmas. It made me miss Varney anew, as he had so much left to give when he died at 50 in 2000 from Lung Cancer. I have now watched three Ernest movies for this column and while I would definitely be up for watching and writing about more, something tells me we’ve already covered the cream of the crop, and everything after this point is bound to be a disappointment. 

Then again, Ernest has surprised me before. It’s entirely possible that he will do so again. 

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