Here is the thing that hits you when you actually sit down and watch every Ernest movie back to back, which I have now done so you do not have to. Jim Varney was a genuinely gifted physical comedian. He started in Shakespeare, played Puck as a teenager, and quietly wanted serious roles his whole career. Instead he spent more than a decade as a rubber-faced pitchman turned movie star, and the films around him got cheaper and lazier almost in real time while he kept giving them everything he had. Ranking the Ernest movies is really an exercise in watching a great clown outclass his own material.
A quick note on the count. Depending on how you slice it there are nine or ten Ernest features. The asterisk is 1986’s Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, an anthology-style sci-fi spoof where Varney plays a supervillain and a half-dozen other characters, with Ernest as just one face in the rotation. It is a fascinating curio, not really an Ernest movie, so it sits outside the ranking. That leaves the nine true Ernest P. Worrell vehicles, counted down from worst to best.
9. Ernest Goes to Africa (1997)
The bottom of the barrel, and not just because it was a tired direct-to-video cash-in by this point. Ernest Goes to Africaleans on broad offensive accents and racial caricature, including blackface, that make it genuinely indefensible regardless of the era it was made in. Strip that away and you are still left with a muddled Indiana Jones knockoff that kids could barely follow. It is the one entry that is not just bad but actively unpleasant to revisit, and it lands last for both reasons.
8. Ernest in the Army (1998)
The final Ernest film, and a sad place to end a run. Varney plays a small-town National Guardsman who ends up in a Middle Eastern war zone, and the whole thing has the budget and energy of a community-theater sketch stretched to feature length. The premise should have been a layup for a physical comic, but the film is too cheap and too aimless to use him. It earns its spot above Africa on a technicality: it is merely forgettable, not offensive.
7. Slam Dunk Ernest (1995)
Ernest gets magical basketball powers from a guardian angel and leads a hapless team to glory. It is exactly as slight as that sounds, with more heart than actual laughs, and the seams of the direct-to-video era are showing everywhere. There is a sweetness to it that keeps it from sinking lower, but nobody is mistaking this for prime Ernest.
6. Ernest Goes to School (1994)
The first of the direct-to-video entries, and the most competent of them. Ernest, a high school janitor, has to earn a diploma to keep his job, gets zapped by an intelligence-boosting experiment, and briefly becomes a smooth genius before reverting. It is standard adult-back-to-school stuff, but the gimmick gives Varney two modes to play, and he commits to both. Passable comfort food.
5. Ernest Rides Again (1993)
The underrated one, and the most important to the franchise’s story. Ernest Rides Again was the last Ernest film to get a wide theatrical release, and it died on arrival, grossing only about a million and a half dollars. That failure is the hinge of the whole series: after it flopped, every subsequent Ernest movie went straight to video. As a movie it is scrappy and cartoonish, with Ernest and a history professor chasing a Revolutionary War cannon stuffed with jewels, but it has a manic looseness the later cheapies never matched. The last gasp of big-screen Ernest.
4. Ernest Goes to Jail (1990)
The funniest pure showcase for what Varney could do. Playing both Ernest and a hardened lookalike criminal named Felix Nash, he gets to be sweet and menacing in the same scene, and the running gag where an electrocuted Ernest becomes magnetized (and eventually shoots lightning from his fingers) is the series at its most gleefully ridiculous. It grossed twenty-five million dollars, the second-biggest haul of the run, and it is the last entry where the production values match the star.
3. Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)
The one that started it all, and the cultural cornerstone. Made for a mere three and a half million dollars, Ernest Goes to Camp grossed twenty-three and a half million and stayed in the box-office top five for three straight weeks, proving a regional ad mascot could open a movie. Critics were not kind; Varney pulled a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star. Audiences did not care, and they were right to ignore them. The exploding-porta-potty, save-the-camp formula here is the template every later film would chase. It is pure, foundational Ernest.
2. Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)
The biggest hit of the bunch and, by the numbers, the people’s choice. Shot almost entirely at the then-unfinished Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, it grossed twenty-eight million dollars, the highest total of any Ernest film, and opened second at the box office behind the original Child’s Play. Director John Cherry called it his favorite of the series, and you can see why: under all the slapstick about a cab driver helping a weary Santa find his successor, there is a genuinely warm idea that Christmas lives in the heart and that decency does not require a redemption arc. It has earned its spot in the annual rotation.
1. Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)
Here is the argument, and to be clear it is not that the other films lack a villain. They have plenty. A land-grabbing strip miner tries to bulldoze the camp, Ernest takes a genuine beating from the foreman’s fists in the process, and a hardened criminal named Felix Nash hijacks his entire life in Jail. The difference is that those are ordinary human bad guys Ernest mostly bumbles his way past. Scared Stupid is the only entry built around a monster, and that is what sets it apart: the supernatural threat gives the film a real genre engine and turns Ernest into an active hero hunting something physical and dangerous, rather than a klutz who trips into the win. Ernest Scared Stupid drops him into a Halloween nightmare, the descendant of a man who once trapped a child-snatching troll, who promptly bungles the family curse and unleashes the thing on his town. The creature work, courtesy of the Chiodo Brothers of Killer Klowns from Outer Space fame, is legitimately gross and spooky for a kids’ movie, Eartha Kitt shows up as the local witch, and the spookiness gives Varney’s chaos a shape the other films lack.
It is worth being honest: it was not the big earner, pulling in about fourteen million dollars, well short of Camp or Christmas. But box office is not the same as staying power, and Scared Stupid has had the longest afterlife of any of them, a Halloween-season perennial that people seek out every October decades later. It is the most complete movie in the series and the one that best understood what its star could do. The best Ernest movie, full stop.
The clown who outlived the joke
What the ranking really shows is a downward slope that had almost nothing to do with Varney. The four films that came out through Disney’s Touchstone and Buena Vista labels look like movies. The home-video cheapies that followed look like obligations. And through all of it, the guy in the denim vest never phoned it in, even when the films around him plainly did.
Varney died of lung cancer in 2000 at fifty, leaving a planned tenth film, Ernest the Pirate, unmade. By then he had already done the thing he is quietly most remembered for, voicing Slinky Dog in the first two Toy Story films, proving he was always more than the mug. He wanted to play Shakespeare. He ended up immortal as a clueless guy yelling at an unseen neighbor named Vern. The least we can do is admit that, even in the bad ones, he was the best thing on screen. KnowhutImean.
