https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um3lKYkBW60
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j93GN5K-Rfg
I saw this in the theater as a kid. It made sense because it was something I may have come up with at the time. But it is completely insane. One of the top 3 anarchist movies for kids.
The movie works so well as satire because Ernest is a wholly innocent character. He tries his best at work but the universe is LITERALLY out to get him.
[SPOILERS]
Ernest is a bank janitor who is despised by his boss and clueless when it comes to the co worker that has obvious feelings for him. Within the first 5 minutes of the film he has completely trashed the bank and it lying in a puddle of suds and foam being violently electrocuted. For the rest of the movie there is a running gag where he is magnetic and metal objects continually find themselves drawn to his body. This is most hilarious WHILE HE IS ON A DATE.
He gets a Jury Duty summons and because he is such an honest and trusting citizen, it makes him as excited as if he had won the lottery. He runs over to tell his neighbors Chuck and Bobby, who are a pair of private security gun nuts that litter their front lawn with landmines and hold shooting practice in the kitchen. Ernest stands next to a paper human target and the camera cuts to Chuck and Bobby. Bobby is shooting from across the house and Chuck yells to Ernest to get out of the line of fire, himself standing right in front of the shooter. It's the best of many scenes that mock gun culture.
In Jury Duty Ernest performs a one man act with an inkpen, illustrating that leaving the life or death of a person in the hands of the average American can turn the entire system into a farce, even if he means well.
The defending attorney at the case he is witnessing somehow convinces everyone that they should move the trial and all the jurors TO THE PRISON, where the murder took place. All the prison guards wear pink zoot suit style jackets with giant shoulder pads and black wraparound sunglasses.
This was all part of a plan of the prisoners to pull a switch with Ernest's doppledanger Felix Nash, who knocks him out and takes his place in the outside. Where Ernest works at a bank and has a girlfriend. Nash begins his plan to rob the bank and his cold and calculating demeanor is ironically being rewarded where Ernest's hapless innocence was continually punished.
An innocent man, Ernest soon finds himself locked into prison, framed for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to capital punishment via electric chair. He tries breaking out by dressing in drag, somehow leaving the prison to approach it from the outside, impersonating his own aunt, but is unsuccessful. He tries some Bugs Bunny-style catapults and those are unsuccessful as well. On the eve of his death he gives a rousing and life affirming dramatic speech in his cell, and when the guards come to lead him to his death, he wilts like a flower, declaring "I don't want to die." It is fucking HEARTBREAKING.
Soon he is executed via electric chair.
And it only makes him stronger.
Speaking in tongues while electricity visibly courses through his body, Ernest exits the prison by harnessing state violence and inflicting it back on itself. He frees prisoners by simply passing by the cells. Effortlessly, he shoots lightning at the prison guards.
By the end of the movie he has transcended death and gravity and is doing the lazily doing the backstroke while floating 20 feet in the air.
"Ernest Goes to Jail" was filmed on location in Nashville, Tenn, and features many actors and undiscovered talents from that area. The guy that plays Bobby quit his job at a library when he was in his 70s to be in Ernest movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Goes_to_Jail
― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Saturday, 29 August 2015 15:03 (eight years ago) link
eight years pass...