DR. OTTO AND THE RIDDLE OF THE GLOOM BEAM (1985)
I feel closer to Ernest P. Worrell than some members of my extended family. When adolescent Jeremy needed to laugh, he did not reach for GHOSTBUSTERS, AUSTIN POWERS, or REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER but a perpetually unwound copy of ERNEST’S GREATEST HITS VOLUME 1. Before he went to Camp, saved Christmas, exploded a troll, or made a coworker’s son lose respect for his father because of magical Nikes, Ernest was just a TV pitchman, the humble product of a starving actor named Jim Varney and fledgling Tennessee ad company Carden & Cherry. The character swiftly achieved a level of fame improbable then and impossible now—how many other marketing gimmicks ever received a dedicated home video release, let alone multiple volumes?
By the late 1990s, even my impeccable rendition of his spot for Braum’s Hamburgers (closest franchise to Cleveland: 772 miles away) was lost on elementary school peers. I can still remember my adrenal thrill at discovering the existence of ERNEST GOES TO AFRICA in the wilds of Hollywood Video, but the moment had passed and, soon, so would Varney himself.
Twenty-some years later, now that nostalgia has overtaken religion as the opiate of the masses, Ernest has mostly managed to evade reappraisal. As a pre-cinematic movie star and children’s television host, he lacks the singular authorship and art-school cool of Pee-wee Herman. Festive immortality has smiled upon ERNEST SCARED STUPID, but it will never receive the Spirit Halloween renaissance of something like HOCUS POCUS, the film that Disney shamelessly re-bolted its genre training wheels onto. Of the nine films that have ERNEST in the title, only three have officially made the leap to Blu-ray—SAVES CHRISTMAS is the last Touchstone production outstanding—and one of the remainders barely scraped onto DVD—RIDES AGAIN is only available in the United States as part of “Ernest’s Wacky Adventures Volume 1.”
As a self-appointed Ernest scholar and evangelist, I’ve sometimes found it difficult even explaining who Ernest is. When initially pitched to Varney by co-creator and director John Cherry, the character was “an obnoxious neighbor who always knows more than you do, who bought the right product when you didn’t.” But for all the punishment and property damage he deals to “Vern,” the unseen POV of most Ernest ads, we don’t hate this walking imposition in a two-piece Canadian tuxedo. The unloved are not immortalized in plastic. I’ve always had my curricula for the curious—SCARED STUPID for the horror crowd, CAMP for ‘80s fetishists, JAIL for everyone else—with either GREATEST HITS VOLUME as an educational chaser, but there’s a blinking, neon asterisk in between.
The commercials may document where Ernest came from, but DR. OTTO AND THE RIDDLE OF THE GLOOM BEAM is a 92-minute bath in the primordial ooze from which he crawled.
The character was already a known quantity in regional markets before DR. OTTO, which is why it opens with a pseudo-commercial to assure audiences they walked into the right theater, but make no mistake—this is not an Ernest vehicle.
What it is, if the RIDDLE can be so succinctly solved, is the primal cackle-scream of Jim Varney, writer-director John Cherry, writer-producer Coke Sams, and all the other Nashville bohemians cashing their unexpected checks and going for broke on a gonzo passion project about a mad scientist with an extra hand growing out of his head.
Dr. Otto himself is the missing link between fellow mad-medical professional Frank-N-Furter and the Super Shredder. He was born that way, both evil and with Jim Varney’s full-sized head; quoth his nurse, “I’ve got terrible news—it lived.” He co-croons the opening ballad—“Our Love Festers (Like an Open Wound)”—with a meandering accent found only in cartoon Europe. His miniature-mountaintop lair is built from insulation foam and furnished by RadioShack clearance aisle; beyond the sci-fi yard-sale chic, this and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are obvious byproducts of the same small-market, big-talent restlessness.
Though he does not yet rule the world, everything in it already bends to the non sequitur will of Dr. Otto. His plan to wipe out all currency with gratuitously rotoscoped lightning is aimed at the root of all American commerce—Cincinnati. As squarish-jawed hero and aspiring Banana Republic model Lance Sterling somberly warns, “As Cincinnati goes, so goes the nation.” But don’t worry about having to root for anybody but the bad guy; Lance is the perfect mix of stupid and misogynist to demand first squeeze at Russian Roulette because he’s tired of his actually capable assistant Doris always doing everything first. It’s a pleasure to watch his torture at the hands of Jim Varney’s acting reel, with egos as altered as the Aussie general of a child soldier army, a ritz-putting dandy with a laser-blasting cane, and a heavily armed variant of Ernest-staple Auntie Nelda. The climax is as if DR. STRANGELOVE ended with George C. Scott brawling all the Peters Sellers to a soundtrack of Sega Genesis guitars and the bassline from Yello’s “Oh Yeah.” No joke is too weird, cheap, or elaborate to make the cut, and, by the time the end credits roll, complete with an apology to the Oscar-winning editor of High Noon, everyone is in on it all by sheer force of enthusiasm alone. You might’ve had to be there, in the finest warehouses and forests Davidson County had to offer circa 1984, but, humbly, even graciously, DR. OTTO makes you feel like you were.
DR. OTTO AND THE RIDDLE OF THE GLOOM BEAM was tested in select Ohio, Kentucky, and Texas theaters on July 19, 1985 and retooled for wider release that August. How it performed is not only undocumented but irrelevant because, two months before the first screening, Ernest upstaged Mickey Mouse at the Indianapolis 500 and landed a meeting with Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Though plans for a DR. OTTO sequel were briefly considered for recycling into ERNEST VS. THE TARANTULA WOMEN, he went to a much more conventional Camp instead. The franchise has its moments of absurdity—GOES TO SCHOOL, the only entry directed by Sams, is particularly deranged—but none came close to the raw, radioactive ore of DR. OTTO.
In an interview with Utah’s Standard-Examiner on opening day of Ernest’s first turn as leading man, Jim Varney couldn’t help but mock the squeaky-clean studio brass trying to make him a big-screen star: “How do you like this idea—ERNEST AND THE CURSE OF HITLER’S BRAIN? But how about ERNEST VS. THE SPACE COMMIES FROM HELL?”
DR. OTTO AND THE RIDDLE OF THE GLOOM BEAM is as close as we’ll ever get to either. And that’s a real shame, know what I mean?
