Chabert Watch: Be My Baby (2007)

Watched:  01/29/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bryce Olson

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.  

Just amazing.

I found this disc for cheap a couple weeks back and have been putting this off because the reviews were not kind.  And for a long time, I was fine avoiding it, because it looked awful.  But here we are.

Be My Baby (2007) wants to be a particular kind of comedy about stunted adulthood and the world's most this-would-never-work scam.  It's entirely misanthropic til its confusing and unearned ending, and I cannot fathom how this got funding if someone didn't just have rich parents.

The script is a trainwreck starting with the concept.  The issues continue with the look and sound of the film - which feels very "student film" in its awkward set-ups and occasional room echoes, etc... do the movie no favors.  Completely flat lighting, etc.. Wooden acting.  Every take feels like "we're gonna get this in two takes and then we have to move on."  

But, my god, the actual story....

I don't know what was going on in Los Angeles from about 1995-2015, but the belief in the baseline shittiness of humanity that drives the whole premise of so many of these low budget movies is absolutely wild.

The plot:  Our Protagonist (Rene Ashton) has made a career out of "working" at her mom's daycare by day - but by night, she basically fake-beds married guys, and then saves their contact info.  She then borrows babies from the daycare and then shows up 12+ months later saying "here's your kid.  If you give me $100,000, I'll walk away and not ruin your marriage and life."   

$100,000.  That's a lot of money now.  In 2007, that was nothing to sneeze at.

And she has done this *a lot*.  She has a whole house, and a pretty nice one.  (One wonders what the plan was when she was no longer able to just pick up dudes in bars, but that's neither here nor there.)

Yes, it's supposed to be a joke and she's supposed to be a bad person.  But it's not... funny?  I don't know why, but there's just no joke there.  It's kind of sad for both sides of the scam.  The guy is trying to make sure he doesn't ruin things for his kids and wife, and she's...  just absolutely without scruples.  She's going to hurt a lot of people.  And with unaffiliated kids at stake, it's just...  kind of shitty?  She seems the entire time like someone who wouldn't bat an eye ripping off the elderly with the right scam.

But....  one wonders, how is she finding an endless string of rich, married guys who can drop $100K and somehow none of these guys are suspicious?  None of the guys get a lawyer or PI involved?  She's doing this with one-night stands - and these guys are going to know that if you pay a blackmailer, they just come back.    

It seems more likely she'd end up in a dumpster somewhere when some dude gets panicky and now she's a vacation photo on Dateline.

For reasons I cannot wrap my head around logistically, the movie is terrified of the idea that somehow she actually has sex with these guys.  So, she gets them blackout drunk so she can go through their wallets for the contact info and then sneak off.   Which in no way would be suspicious for *any* of these fellows.  And the notion they'd even recognize this girl a year on - if actually black out drunk - seems unlikely at best.

The movie also has a joke where the lead guy gets roofied.  Hilarious. 

Well, eventually through some convoluted circumstances she lands a single dude who she thinks is married - but he is not.  When she tries the stunt on him, he sees through it, but so horny is he for her, he leans into it.  This sets off a chain of events as she has to stick to her ruse as the guy (Brody Hutzler?) just says he wants to be in the baby's life.  In the worldview of this movie, someone actually wanting to step up is as likely as a unicorn appearing.

The gag should be that she keeps having to find new babies, but after she gets her baby supply cut off (he mom fires her) she has to find other babies.  It should be funny.  It absolutely is not.  And they just stop with showing the baby at all at some point, the plot just absolutely melting before your eyes.

The guy is a divorce attorney and does well, so he hires Lacey Chabert - a small time actress he knows as a hostess at a restaurant - to play his wife when he ups the stakes by meeting with Our Hero.

That's it.  Chabert's barely in the movie, but she's on the front of all of the advertising. One wonders what this movie would have been if she actually was the lead.

Chabert is absolutely doing her best here, but the movie is so flat, it feels kind of out of place when she does her thing.  She has what should be a big, comedic scene, but the two leads' reaction is so... nothing...  they're not helping and it really does feel awkward.

The other name stars in the movie include Cris Judd who you will remember as the dancer ex-husband of JLo from 25 years ago.  (He is not good at acting.)  Also, we get Rance Howard - father of Ron and Clint Howard.  And Julia Duffy is in the movie as the lead's mom who had her at 16, which is how we explain why between Duffy looking much younger than her not-exactly-advanced age, and our star looking healthy but minus that fountain-of-youth look, our star and Duffy look more like sisters.

Speaking of our star, Rene Ashton - she's very much still out there working.  Lots of one-off parts on TV series I don't watch.  It made me wonder what she thought she was doing, what this moonshot was for her.  She's also listed as a writer on the movie, so she was very involved.  I have to assume this was this her attempt to have a moment with a particular flavor of comedy, but that does not make it to screen through performance, writing, or any particular thing in the movie. Comedy may not be her bag.

Lead guy Brody Hutzler is kind of trying, but seems more game than funny.  There's a lot of mugging.  So much mugging.  It doesn't help that he's paired with Cris Judd, who feels like when they let an athlete onto SNL and that person is just doing their best playing an obnoxious person.

Director Bryce Olson seems to be a post-coordinator in the industry, and for animation at that, so I'm not sure how he was tapped - he also maybe hasn't been in the industry in a decade. 

Despite the fact our hero is trying to scam the guy out of money until the last second - which he knows! (it's hard to play a long game about a baby and not have access to a baby) we're to believe that they fall in love along the way.  

I'm sure this was movie intended to fit in with movies of the 40-Year-Old Virgin era, where it was maybe kind of crazy and over the top, and a bit raunchy.  But it doesn't know how to do what those movies did (and most of those haven't really stood the test of time).  Chabert is their biggest asset as a comedic actor, and she's not really framed correctly.  

Bad comedies aren't entertaining.  They're just... bad.  And when none of its working, it winds up feeling like you're being dragged feet first through the mud by a drunk horse.  I use the term "sociopath" pretty willy-nilly in my write-ups, but this feels like a movie by sociopaths and what they think is funny and very watchable. This movie is one or two music cues from being a Lifetime thriller.

If the studio machine does anything, it's maybe stop movies like this before they go much further.

By the way, the poster is misleading - it seems to suggest guy in pink is dealing with three women.  Girl on left is our hero in a wig from flashback sequences that SHOULD have been at the beginning but get inserted 2/3rds of the way through the movie.  Then Chabert.  Then a teenage babysitter who is in the movie for maybe five minutes.