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.

Chabert Freeze Watch: All of My Heart (2015)

Watched:  01/24/206

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Peter DeLuise

I am logging everything.  Normally I wouldn't have mentioned this re-watch, but this is what we put on while we were waiting to see if we were going to lose power on Saturday night.  

As your foremost Chabert movie expert, this is definitely one of the better written parts she's been given at Hallmark, and she works very well with co-star Brennan Elliot.  

If you're worried you're about to lose power and need to put something on while you panic mildly, this is perfectly fine.

Chabert Watch: Lost in Paradise (2026)

Watched: 01/04/2026

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

Job: head of a premier fashion design studio

Location of story:  Fiji

new skill:  jungle and beach survival

Man:  Ian Harding

Job of Man: Chef!

Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to Fiji

Event:  Plane crash

Food:  fish

Again, I'd love to know what stats the Hallmark Channel has about viewership when they have Lacey Chabert in a movie.  Because someone ran the numbers and was able to show that sending a Hallmark crew and stars to Fiji was going to be profitable.

It's not the first time Chabert has wrangled a destination movie.  I've seen her in movies filmed in Malta, Ireland (once as Ireland, once doubling as Scotland), vague Europe, South Africa, Italy and I think Greece.  And for the US, I know she went to Hawaii for a movie.  I feel like she's been in Manhattan at some point.

Somehow Fiji feels particularly nuts, but off to Fiji this movie went.  

2025 Watch: Movies By The Numbers

A Signal Watch Movie Year in Review: by the numbers

Each year we tally the number of movies watched and blogged, and then we break down what we watched into a few categories.  There's no real reason for this - no one gets a prize.  But let me do my little OCD companion piece to actually blogging all of these movies.

• Our Favorite movies of 2025
• Our Least favorite movies of 2025

Movies By The Numbers - Previous Years

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

Let's Get Started

In 2025, we watched 255 movies.  Last year we counted 253 movies, so... basically the same.  

By clicking here, you can see the spreadsheet from which this data (these data?) are derived.

Here's a weird one - because we repeat-viewed so many movies (I even watched Jaws twice this year) we only watched 246 unique movies in 2025.  However, we're considering each movie watched where a post appeared as "a movie", so it's 255...  them's the rules.

Chabert Watch: Sherman's Way (2008)

Watched:  12/28/2025

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Craig M. Saavedra

This is my final Chabert film of ChabertQuest 2025.  Please clap.  

Well, first, this movie has a surprising lack of Chabert in it whatsoever.  She's in the opening scenes as our lead's girlfriend who predictably dumps him, which is the catalyst for the rest of the film.  I think she's gone 10 minutes in.

So, that's that.

A Christmas Regret Watch: A Little Piece of Heaven (1991)

everything on this DVD cover is a lie

Watched:  12/23/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second (and last)

Director:  Mimi Leder

While watching A Little Piece of Heaven (1991) for ChabertQuest2025, I knew instantly that this would be a movie to share with Dug and K.  

As longtime readers will know, sharing terrible Christmas movies with Jamie's brother, Dug and his wife K, is a yearly tradition here at The Signal Watch.  And, for reasons I cannot guess, Christmas seems to really bring out some absolute nonsense, from failed comedy concepts like Santa with Muscles to the utterly sincere failures, like this one.

There are many flavors of "this movie is a bad idea" out there, and we've covered a lot of them.  But this TV movie commits the sin of, as Dug put it, insisting that the ends justifies the means.  Even if the ends are highly, highly questionable.  And the means are absolutely mortifying.  

This movie contains:

• a very 90's take on an actor playing someone "special"
• drugging a child
• kidnapping a drugged child
• light casual racism
• 90's screenplay ingrained racism
• child slave labor
• child emotional labor
• gaslighting within gaslighting, like an inception where we're passing through layers of bullshit that's knee-deep
• nonsense rationalization
• child abuse-ploitation
• more kidnapping
• transporting minors
• abandoning pigs
• basically casting all those horror stories you see about people kidnapping people off the street and keeping them in their basement, or imprisoning children, and turning the abductor into a hero
• the greatest bullshit ending to a movie ever committed to screen
• Kirk Cameron

But, fun fact, a very young Lacey Chabert received an Emmy Nomination for her role as "Princess".  

Anyway, somehow this movie was written, produced, filmed, edited and given a plum primetime slot on network TV.  And everyone thought this was fine.  Even the scene where it's clear someone is tossing chickens out of a window.  And all of young Jussie Smollet's dialog.  

Chabert Watch: Home Front (2002) (aka: The Scoundrel's Wife)

Watched:  12/22/2025

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Glen Pitre

There's a lot going on in Home Front (aka: The Scoundrel's Wife - 2002).  Some might argue too much.  

A period piece taking place mostly during World War II, it's about a woman and her family living on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, who are pariahs already when the war breaks out.  It seems some years before the woman (Tatum O'Neal) and her husband may have gotten up to misdeeds that will be shared later.

It's a bit of a frustrating movie because it's a look at some real life things - that German U-Boats were off the US coast causing havoc, there was concern about internal collaborators, etc....  And some of this forgotten history is illuminated brilliantly, really, as O'Neal's family is awakened by a fire's glow off in the distance, out over the water as a U-Boat hits a shipping vessel.  

Meanwhile, life in the small fishing village carries on for O'Neal and her teenage son, Blue, and her daughter, Florida (Chabert), just aging into adulthood.  A doctor moves in nextdoor, but he has what seems to be a German accent (Julian Sands).  Meanwhile, the town Priest (Tim Curry) wrestles with alcohol.

Chabert Re-Watch: Christmas at Castle Hart (2021)

Watched:  I think 12/12/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  Second?

Director:  Stefan Scaini

Job: Phony event planner

Location of story:  Ireland somewhere

new skill: Faking it til she's making it

Man: Stuart Townsend

Job of Man: Earl?  Duke?  Something./ Architect

Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to

Event: Christmas Soiree

Food: I forget

My intention with these posts is not to get overly meta, but when this movie ended I said to Jamie:

I rewatched this one because I barely wrote it up before, and couldn't remember it at all, and now that I've rewatched it, I am not going to remember it in three weeks.

Y'all, I didn't even remember to write up Christmas at Castle Hart (2021) the night we watched it.  And I only rewatched it because I felt I needed to write it up.

I don't know what kind of personal purgatory I've sent myself to with my whimsy, but here we are.

On to the show.

Chabert plays a caterer who gets fired from her gig because her sister (Ali Hardiman) is a real piece of work but Chabert is a good girl and supports her dimwitted sister.  The two head to Ireland to look up some family genealogy since they have the holidays and time to spare (and famously no one is short-handed for catering help during Christmas, and money is not a thing in Hallmarkland).  

Their plan:  When they get back to the US, they plan to start their own event planning company, but whilst in Ireland - drink?  

Well, instead of a relaxing time in the Emerald Isle confusion and lies abound, and Chabert poses as her former boss - an event planner to the stars, hitching herself to a major local event in a sleepy town in a generic North American version of "Ireland" based on post cards and Lucky Charms commercials.

Chabert Watch: Slightly Single in LA (2013)

Ah, the "look at our galaxy of stars" rom-com poster.  Always a promising sign.

Watched:  12/12/2025

Format DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Christie Will Wolf

Editor's note:  we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography.  I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online (one way or another).  

Ugh.  

File this under "this movie was never aimed at me" but also "never write fiction that is a thinly veiled version of a story about yourself".

Christie Will Wolf (here listed as Christie Will) is the writer/ director/ producer of Slightly Single in LA (2013).  These days she's a prolific director and producer of Hallmark movies, and I've seen some of them in whole or part.  She also was the mastermind behind 2011's Holiday Heist, one of the hardest-to-watch movies viewed during ChabertQuest 2025.  

The movie is a rom-com/ would-be Sex in the City about the foibles of a group of women and their token gay friend (Jonathan Bennet).  The story follows around Chabert's character, Dale, who has had bad luck in love.  But what's played for comedy is merely comedy shaped but at no time made me so much as crack a smile.  The movie feels like it's about someone with terrible risk analysis and decision making skills.  But the movie is written, directed and produced by one person - who seems totally unaware that the characters are not just unrelatable, but deeply unsympathetic.  

This lead character sucks.  But she sucks the least of all of the characters, so... yay?

Chabert Holiday Rewatch: The Tree That Saved Christmas (2014)

My original rules for ChabertQuest 2025 included not re-watching and re-posting on movies I'd already seen and written up.  Somehow it bothered me that I didn't rewatch this one even though I'd previously seen The Tree That Saved Christmas (2014) and wrote it up back during lockdown.  

All I remembered was that the snow was pretty much non-existent (in Vermont in December) and maybe you could see some blankets thrown down to double as snow.  So, I decided to give it one more whirl to make sure no Chabert-stone was left unturned during ChabertQuest.  

This may have aired on Hallmark, but, if so, it's a small, indie movie that was licensed to Hallmark, which was their model for a while.  These days, I think they own a lot more of the movies that they air.  Thus, older movies like this are out there, but not officially Hallmark at this point.  

This movie arrives in Year 2 of Chabert making movies for Hallmark-type outfits.  She'd made Matchmaker Santa in 2013, and by 2014 was in A Royal Christmas, which is kind of considered a Hallmark classic by Hallmark nerds, and is arguably the real start of Chabert's rise to Hallmark supremacy.  In 2014, for good or ill, she also made this movie.

Chabert Christmas Watch: She's Making a List (2025)

Watched:  12/06/2025

Format:  Hallmark Channel

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stacey N. Harding

Job: Spy for the Naughtylist

Location of story:  Unclear but LA?/ Snowy generic USA

new skill: Empathy

Man: Andrew Walker

Job of Man: Restaurant consultant

Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to?

Event: Christmas Eve

Food: dessert pizza

Here you go, Randolph.

For a while, actor Lacey Chabert has been tapped The Queen of Hallmark Christmas.   At the start of 2025, Hallmark signed an exclusive contract with Chabert, and as far as I know, the only such contract ever signed by the media concern, locking in talent.  What numbers they had on hand to drive that decision must have been pretty interesting.

This year, Chabert would go on to star in a Halloween movie,  this movie - She's Making a List (2025) , and in January, she's starring in a movie about being stranded in paradise.  She has both her own product line in Hallmark stores, and Keepsake - a line of ornaments at Hallmark - released a Lacey Chabert ornament.  Not a "here's a Star Trek character" ornament, just a Lacey Chabert ornament.  

Just before starting on this post, NathanC sent me an article from Variety that states Chabert is filming a Hallmark movie at Disney World for Christmas 2026.  So, she's doing okay, if you're wondering.  

So, for Hallmark and Chabert both, a LOT was riding on the film.  Would all this investment pay off? 

Chabert Watch: Hometown Legend (2002)

Watched:  12/05/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  James Anderson (I fully believe this is an Alan Smithee name for someone)

Editor's note:  we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography.  I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online one way or another.  This one set me back about $6.10.

First, this DVD, purchased as "used" from a Goodwill had never been opened.  Not since the movie was released in, like, 2003 on DVD.  It was wrapped in some sort of transport wrap from the seller, then the original shrink wrap, and THEN still had the vertical AND horizontal security stickers across the packaging intact.

This movie was produced by a Christian production company and some involved are still in movies.  As I bought this on a 2000's-era DVD, it has bonus features including a full Director's commentary I really want to listen to.  But, more importantly, there's all kinds of bonus content about Jerry B. Jenkins - which the DVD itself says is the most famous writer you never heard of.  Apparently he's the mastermind behind this movie?  And (deep sigh) the guy who wrote the Left Behind books.  And a bunch of other stuff.  This seems to be the Jenkins family parlaying their book money into movies.

But, yeah, he essentially uses the bonus features to promote himself.  Amazing choice.

Neo-Noirvember Chabert Watch: The Pleasure Drivers (2006)

Watched:  11/29/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andrzej Sekula

Editor's note:  we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography.  I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online one way or another.  This one set me back about $5.

Truly a product of a particular decade, somehow The Pleasure Drivers (2006) arrived about seven years after that decade.  It's another LA-based low-budget crime movie, with this one peppering itself with vague philosophical aspirations, but what they are saying lacks any insight and is dumb.  And, the movie is entirely populated by characters who take their cues from how human beings behave from other movies, leaving us with weird third-generation xeroxes of motivation instead of anything identifiable as human.  

Everything about the film feels late-90's, part of the post Pulp Fiction indie boom.  It's three stories that loosely intertwine, and, of course, collide at the end.  But none of the three stories is very interesting and none of the characters terribly watchable.  

Chabert Holiday Micro-Watch: Maybe This Christmas (2025)

Chabert may have signed an exclusive deal with Hallmark for making movies and selling some lovely products in Hallmark stores, but after last year's slam dunk ad with Philosophy, she's now got a gig with Maybelline.  And while we don't believe she could possibly have a blemish, this year she's re-teaming with Dustin Milligan to sell concealer.

Over a handful of 30-second episodes, we get more story than most Hallmark movies.

All 5 episodes in one convenient video:

"Hallmark Channel's Christmas Concert" (2019) might be the Hallmark Channel's Star Wars Holiday Special

This item does not appear on the IMDB for Ms. Lacey Chabert under "actor", but under "self" so I'd initially missed it.  But it popped up on Hallmark as an option, and I wasn't going to not watch it.  

So, what is it?

It's a bizarre artifact of where Hallmark was in 2019, I guess.  And the watchword for the whole show is "awkward".  There clearly was a lack of rehearsal time, and a spirit of "we're pros, we'll wing it" that doesn't play particularly well.  No one here is Bob Hope and keeping this on the rails.

The show is *not* exactly a concert, but kinda, sorta framed like one of those old-school Christmas specials where a celebrity pretends they're in their house.  Lacey Chabert is throwing a party where other Hallmark stars are her guests, but she's also acknowledging the camera (and sometimes awkwardly looking at it).  

One-by-one, a series of Hallmark stars come in, and then they each sing a Christmas standard in what I assume is not actually Chabert's livingroom and kitchen.  But it's not a set - I'm pretty sure that's a real house.  No set would be this poorly designed for television coverage.

Chabert Holiday Watch: Matchmaker Santa (2012)

Watched:  11/20/2025

Format:  UP Faith and Family

Viewing:  First

Director:  Davis S. Cass Sr.

Job: Baker

Location of story:  Somewhere in California?  Outside of San Francisco

new skill:  Elfing

Man:  Adam Mayfield

Job of Man:  Bitch Boy to a CEO

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to

Event:  Christmas tree lighting ceremony

Food:  Cookies

Editor's note: I was unable to find this movie during ChabertQuest2025, but saw it was now available on "UP Faith and Family", and so got a 7 day free trial.

So, new to me and not a Hallmark movie, exactly.  This movie is about a Santa who will stop at literally nothing to make sure Lacey Chabert and her boyfriend break up so that he may force her into a relationship with someone else.  Kris Kringle will bend the very laws of nature, create life, destroy roads...  

This Santa is mad with power.

Anyway, for a long time, and maybe still, a lot of the movies on Hallmark were technically independent movies.  I am unclear how it works now, but basically Hallmark would help fund movies in exchange for North American distribution.  But after X amount of time, these movies were back in the hands of the producers.  And so it was I now am enjoying a 7-day trial of the UP Faith and Family Network.

Part of how Hallmark had so many movies in the years where it seemed like a factory cranking out way too many movies, this was the trick.  Hallmark was essentially licensing very cheap indie movies, and part of them funding those movies was that Hallmark was given script approval for kicking in some percent of the film's budget.  

And, thus, the sameness of Hallmark.  They managed to pull off low-risk/ high-reward for years and people learned to write for them.

Thus, Matchmaker Santa (2012) is also, technically, Chabert's first Hallmark Christmas movie.  So, bit of trivia for you.

But you want to know about Santa and his unstoppable interest in getting people to hook up.

Chabert Hallmark Holiday Watch: A Merry Scottish Christmas (2023)

what do you know?  I watched this on the 2nd anniversary of the movie's release

Watched:  11/18/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Dustin Rikert

Job: Doctor

Location of story:  Somewhere in Scotland

new skill:  Lording over peasants

Man:  James Robinson

Job of Man:  Groundskeeper

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to

Event:  Some underwhelming solstice thing, a banger of a party and a ball

Food:  liquor, really

So, I thought I'd covered this movie because of the image I used for my 2023 Hallmark report when I was moving too fast assembling my ChabertQuest2025 list.  But I had not.  So here we go.

This is a movie about a naive American doctor and her family who inherit a Scottish castle.  However, the diabolical groundskeeper seduces and bamboozles the doctor into falling for him so that he may claim ownership of the lands he's worked since he was a child.  That same labor presumably led to his father's early demise, and this is his revenge.  

With dead eyed smiles, he earns the trust of the stressed out family, offering to take care of everything and let them live off the fat of their inheritance.  

Unfortunately the movie ends just after he's successfully bedded the heiress doctor but before we can put his nefarious schemes into motion, so we never see that part.

(take 2)

Chabert Hallmark Holiday Watch: Haul Out the Holly - Lit Up (2023)

Watched: 11/16/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  second

Director:  Maclain Nelson

Job: Copywriter/ Editor?  She never works during this whole movie

Location of story:  Evergreen Lane - which I think is in Salt Lake City

new skill:  Mastery of the Christmas Arts

Man:  Wes Brown

Job of Man:  Architect

Goes to/ Returns to:  stays in same place (this is the 2nd installment)

Event:  Several ongoing Christmas festivities

Food:  Cookies

Editor's Note:  So, y'all.  Despite my stated goals and belief I'd done a phenomenal job documenting ChabertQuest 2025 (pats self on back), I messed this one up.  Yes, I'd seen this movie, but had I written it up?  I had not.  Thought I had, but that was a lie I told myself, and discovered my error in July.  I felt terrible as we agreed the the deal was I would watch and review all of the movies I could find starring one Lacey Chabert and you'd be like "why are you doing this?"

So, here we are, rewatching this one.  And writing up this movie.  For you, the people.

There were really only so many directions one could go with the premise of Haul Out The Holly (2022), the first film in what is now a trilogy.  

The premise of the first film is that a woman breaks up with her live-in boyfriend and goes home for Christmas, only to find that her parents weren't expecting her and are actually moving to a seniors' condo in Florida.  She's essentially left behind in her parents' McMansion.  However, her own father was head of the HOA, and he set up a very Christmassy set of rules, which Chabert finds herself required to adhere to (despite the fact she does not own the house) and is force marched through the holiday season.  

Guys, she also falls for Man nextdoor along the way.

So... we end the film with Christmas, love, and a 5000 square foot house in which she'll creep around like a Victorian ghost, I guess.  

But what next?  Haul out another holiday?  Tragedy strikes Evergreen Lane?  She casually starts putting out inverted pineapples when the neighbors come over?

Here in the sequel, Emily (Chabert) been gifted her parents house, she's all-in on Christmas madness, dating Man, and helping out with the neighborhood festivities.  

However, as Christmas approaches and events are just beginning, the Jolly Johnsons, winners of a Christmas-themed reality show, move into the cul-de-sac.  To the longtime Christmas-nerds of Evergreen Lane, this is like having your favorite quarterback or rock star move in and they flip out (yes, these movies operate in a cartoonish heightened reality).  

Chabert Hallo-Watch: Haul Out The Halloween (2025)

Watched: 10/12/2025

Format:  Hallmark+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Maclain Nelson

Job: Copywriter/ Children's Book Author

Location of story:  Evergreen Lane - which I think is in Salt Lake City

new skill:  it's an old skill remembered - how to draw and write kid's books

Man:  Wes Brown

Job of Man:  Architect

Goes to/ Returns to:  stays in same place (this is the 3rd installment)

Event:  Halloween street fair

Food:  Cookies

Well, Ms. Lacey Chabert has released a new movie upon the Hallmark channel, and so we're back!

This is the third installment in the Haul Out the Holly Saga, a movie series which is about people who are absolutely nuts for holidays, their HOA and rules.  We've abandoned Christmas for Halloween this go-round, which - given the first movies are about going over the top with traditions - seems appropriate.  

This is, I should mention, a wacky comedy series with everything about the 'burbs heightened and zany, so don't take it too seriously.  It's a departure from Hallmark's usual "the characters are all smiling to let you know a joke happened" style of comedy, and, instead, works more like an 00's-era comedy - complete with joke-every-15-second pop culture referencing and a rap by Octogenarians.  

Happy Birthday, Lacey Chabert

those aren't balloons, they're bubbles of Hubba Bubba

Well, we watched 70-something Lacey Chabert movies in the last year, so we'd be remiss not giving a birthday shoutout to the Hallmark Queen of Christmas.  

As of yesterday, we've also now seen all of Chabert's reality show, "Celebrations".*  And, I guess, Chabert's holiday collection has now dropped at Hallmark.com.   So I guess make Chabert happy and line her pockets by buying some stuff.

*It was a slow weekend as Jamie was not feeling great.