April 1: Fool Me! — Share a foolish film for the holiday.

In the ninth and final film in the Ernest series, this time, we find our hero, Ernest P. Worrell (Jim Varney), wanting to drive a big rig and somehow enlisting in the Army reserves. It’s a big leap from being the golf ball collector to being part of a UN force in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Karifistan, a place in danger of being invaded by Islamic madman Tufuti of Arisia (Ivan Lucas).

Yes, even when I try to escape the news, the war in the Middle East comes back all over again, and now, Ernest is battling infidels.

Ernest has already engaged United Nations peacekeeping commander Pierre Gullet (David Muller), so when things go bad — when Ernest gets into the shit, like they said in ‘Nam — our hero must break into a prison camp called Sector 32 and finally drive that big truck, this one with a Pluton missile. Also: Gullet is the bad guy, selling out the world to a bad guy who seems just like Dr. Klaw on Inspector Gadget.

Varney still did commercials as Ernest P. Worrell up until 1999, but he was suffering from cancer while making this. As for creator/director/writer John R. Cherry III, he had planned for Varney to star in a non-Ernest comedy film, but Varney had gotten so sick while shooting the movie that Cherry couldn’t bring himself to finish it. When Varney died two years later, he retired. Also, my Vietnam joke a paragraph or so ago? Yeah, Cherry served in Vietnam and used Ernest Productions to create a new life for himself. He felt this film was his most personal, and now I feel like a jerk for writing that.

This film and the previous movie, Ernest Goes to Africa (1997), were shot back-to-back in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. It was called Stormin’ Ernest then, and that title shows up in the credits.

This is… look, Ernest turns out to be the long-awaited messiah foretold in a Middle Eastern prophecy. I don’t know how this happened or was filmed, but there you go.

You can watch this on Tubi.