Chabert Watch: High Hopes (2006)

the actual two leads aren't on the poster?

Watched:  02/21/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First (and last)

Director:  Joe Eckardt

Blogger's Note:  Well, pals, here we hit a major milestone of ChabertQuest.  As far as I know, this movie is the last live-action Chabert movie on the list that seems to be available on disc and/ or streaming.  Of the 90 films on my list, only five remain, and I am not sure two of them ever saw the light of day.  And the others may just disappear into the fog of time, never having had a physical or streaming media release.  That said, I'd love to finish off the list.  

As near as I can guess, this movie was a money laundering scheme.  Like, bring in money saying you have name people but spend none of it on the actual movie as you shoot in your house.

There's no obvious script to High Hopes (2006), it genuinely feels like they had a rough idea of what they wanted to do, but then they just kind of shot a movie - sometimes with lines, sometimes not - when they had enough actors in the room.  Or, they had rewrites and more rewrites on a movie that is 99.99% set up for a punchline that is telegraphed well in advance, bigoted and was never going to be funny.

And what's weird is - you will recognize some of these actors.  While it *feels* like many-a no-budget movie by and starring nobodies, in 2006, several of these actors were still adjacent to their heyday.  I really don't understand why they put this out.  Unless it was just moving money around somehow.

In theory the movie stars Corin Nemic, who you may remember as Parker Lewis (who could not lose).  David Faustino of Married With Children is a main character.  Jason Mewes of the Kevin Smith film canon is here.  Danny Trejo is a producer and appears in one scene.  Director Robert Rodriguez has one scene where he appears on the other end of the phone.  And human virus Andy Dick is in a scene.  Ted Raimi is in the movie for about three minutes.

I say "in theory" it stars Nemic, but about 1/2 way through, the movie kind of forgets what it's about and just wanders around and we kind of forget we started the movie with him scamming his way into a lead role in a major movie.  But that just gets kind of dropped in favor of a story about raising money to make an indie feature with a suitcase of government weed.  I'm not sure lifting the "I'm selling that mythical government weed" plot from Half-Baked, the quintessential 90's pot movie, is a phenomenal idea.  

Again, I would *love* to know what was going in the life of Lacey Chabert in the decade between Mean Girls and starting to do Hallmark on the regular.  This is one of six movies she did released in 2006, which means probably shot in 2004 or 2005.  I just really question what her representation was doing for her at this time.

Clearly she was a commodity, because the movie hired Lacey Chabert for one day to get three scenes out of her and put her on the poster and the DVD case.  And she is actually on the spine despite being in the movie for about five minutes total.  She's... fine?  Who can say?

Wildly - Dana Gonzalez - a solid director and cinematographer who works with Noah Hawley worked on this.

Worth noting - our actual leads are not on the cover of the DVD.  There's obviously a story here, and I'd love to know what it was.  Maybe not huge names, but recognizable faces in 2006.  Worth noting - of the people on the DVD cover above, 3 of these people did serious time in rehab and at least two have done jail time.  Maybe three.  

The plot is about losers in LA trying to get money for a movie and they'll do it by securing some magic government weed by ripping it off from their dealer who came by it a bit by mistake.  This takes all movie.  I'll be honest and say at some point I realized whole scenes were happening that went nowhere and didn't seem to connect to anything else and I started skipping at 2x speed to the next scene.  And still I felt I missed nothing.  Because it's not a movie.  It's people fucking around.

The joke/ punchline is that Lacey Chabert is dating David Faustino, and she's had him pick up her brother from some medical experiment where he was given a cocktail of drugs leaving him a deaf mute with a scrambled brain.  The R-word is used *repeatedly* in this movie in relation to this guy, and even in 2006, I hadn't really heard that word used much since the 1980's for pretty good reasons. 

Anyway - while Chabert is away, they have to babysit the guy who, of course, steals the magic weed at the end.  Which is literally in the movie's description on IMDB.  So I'm not even sure this is a spoiler.

If I may - would-be-filmmakers, I'm talking to you now.  Before beginning ChabertQuest, I had already seen a few of these types of movies in the 1990's, and it was hacky then.  And I think I had to watch at least three of them as part of this venture.  All of them have the same shitty low quality, belief that they're hilarious secret geniuses, and absolutely no jokes while insisting they've made a comedy.  You can do other things.  This is dumb.  And not what they meant when they said "write what you know".

Anyway - thanks, I hate it.

I hope whatever happened here at least got some people paid.  But, holy @#$% was this embarrassing.  I only had time to watch one movie on Saturday, and this was not an ideal way to spend that time.