In Bob Chinn’s Baby Cakes, a group of female bicyclists begin a 500 mile coastal trip to participate in a race in Los Angeles which they slowly forget about as they get wrapped up in their own romantic entanglements with a group of surfers they meet along the way (kinds like Breaking Away meets L’Avventura but with the L.A. Gran Prix getting memory-holed instead of Lea Massari). Produced for Essex in 1980 (and, puzzlingly, not released until 1982), Baby Cakes’s resemblance to Breaking Away isn’t just surface as Rhonda Jo Petty’s top billing is doing all the metaphoric riding while it attempts to elevate the star power of Jamie Leigh in its jet stream. It doesn’t fully work because the film never really resolves itself and Leigh doesn’t have much in the way of screen presence, but the copious coastal exteriors and the rest of the cast keep things enjoyable if not particularly earth-shattering.
Jamie Leigh plays Suzie, the natural lead in a trio of cyclists which includes Rhonda (Rhonda Jo Petty) and Denise (Victoria Slick). After winning yet another bicycle race, Suzie gets jazzed up to compete in the L.A. Grand Prix which is to be held at the end of June (its date of Saturday, June 28th confirms the film’s 1980 production year) so she convinces her two buds to ride down the length of the Pacific Coast Highway with her so she can ride in it. En route, they meet up with a group of surfers (Randy West, Billy Dee, and Blair Harris) and are terrorized by a misogynistic slob in an RV (Mike Horner), and his no-count, hillbilly buddy (Rock Steadie).
For most of its running time, the sweet summer romance angle of Baby Cakes is almost perfectly balanced with the film’s more lustful, uninhibited passages. The opening sex scene is a juxtaposition between Jamie’s status as a determined competitor and her relationship with her bike vs. the perpetually horny cavorting of her friends. The intercutting between Jamie tuning up her ten-speed in the garage and the foursome in the other room works really well in terms of breaking up the action and building Suze’s character, highlighting the exact kind of discipline you’d have to have to give up partying with Rhonda Jo Petty and Victoria Slick. In the scene with Petty and Slick (making short work of Perry Mann and Billy Counes), Chinn’s Olympian, overhead shots do not disappoint and he works all the players in a kind of synchronized pile-up as each couple mirror the other in action and deed with lots of rack focus spread between the two.
Additionally, Chinn gets some really terrific exterior work in Baby Cakes courtesy of “The Incredible” Ken Gibb, Chinn’s longtime cinematographer who, aside from the director, is the only person to actually receive a credit on the film. To give Baby Cakes an air of authenticity, Chinn actually had these gals pedaling up and down the roads on ten-speeds. And it is because of this that Jamie Leigh looks like she is about to keel over from a heart attack during the opening credits. Literally, this woman looks like she’s in pain and I would much easier believe the rough-and-tumble Rhonda Jo Petty in the lead role of a competitive bicyclist due to the natural physicality she had as someone who grew up riding horses and dirt bikes.
But that’s not the Rhonda Jo Petty we get in Baby Cakes and that ends up being big hallelujah as she is absolutely hilarious and totally believable as the friend you’d call to show you the very best time of your life, but definitely NOT the one you’d call to housesit and watch your pet for the weekend. Even though she’s a secondary character, she completely owns the movie each time she’s on screen. When asked exactly when their summer jobs down at the wharf start, she has absolutely no idea other than it’s within the next two weeks. When she’s called out for latching onto two guys who can barely remember their own names, “oh what the hell… the beer is free” is her response. She gets so hungover that she tells her friend to crawl into the bathroom and throw up for her. This is a girl who knows how to party and I swear I lived down the street from this character when I was a kid.
Though she had done some loop work, Baby Cakes proved to be Jamie Leigh’s sole feature and that’s probably for the best as she’s a bit weak in her sex scenes and she doesn’t make much of an impression in the lead. This isn’t entirely her fault as her character, the do-gooder looking for Mr. Right, is fairly pap. Luckily, she’s surrounded by a great bunch of actors who are all quite good. Billy Dee, and Blair Harris all look and act the part as surfers out prowling the coast for tall waves and a good time and both Mike Horner and Rock Steadie put in yeoman’s work as loathsome creeps on wheels. But Randy West (introduced in a tasteful encounter with a hotel maid played by Misty Regan) was an actor for whom nice guy roles were made and his Greek Adonis looks and gentle touch more than makes up for Leigh’s slight drawbacks in their scenes together.
In its current incarnation, the final nine and a half minutes of Baby Cakes are a mangled mess. The only transfer available was no doubt struck from a edited video master as there is a hamfisted attempt to cut around the fact that, in the film’s climax, Petty’s hands have been bound by Mike Horner and that she and Slick are sexually assaulted (no doubt a MIPORN-adjacent editing decision on the part of Essex). Luckily, for the sake of the scene, Petty plays it as a hot kink and she can barely keep from laughing as she calls Horner a “fucking nerd,” all the while Slick stays with the program and plays her part with a humorous exasperation at Steadie’s verbosity. What’s ironic is that it’s all pretty soft but, because of the Mr. Magoo-level of surgery that was feverishly working against the moral headwinds in the eighties, it makes it seem much more untoward and off-putting that it really is with the original cinematic idea only barely intact and visible though all the chaos.
Despite the film’s breezy look and feel, the shoot was not a pleasant one for Bob Chinn as producer/screenwriter Joe Steinman proved to be an incredibly meddlesome presence, forcing Chinn’s hand in some scenes, changing the project’s name from the more appropriately titled California Girls to (for whatever reason) Baby Cakes, and cutting the film in its entirety (though, in fairness, the latter happened after production wrapped and Chinn more or less walked away from it out of frustration). Despite their differences, as a favor to Steiman, Chinn went on to shoot a prologue for Ed Brown’s The Prey which was tacked on to the film’s international release and he and Steinman remained on good terms. But the experience on Baby Cakes caused Chinn to never again take a higher budget in exchange for creative control.
Viewed from the outside, Baby Cakes falls somewhere in the bottom-middle of Bob Chinn’s filmography. It’s definitely flyaway material but the cast seems like they’re having a great time, the sex scenes are hot, and it’s a well-paced and easygoing affair. But without a third-act resolution, the film takes a quick out and it quite literally ends on a road to nowhere. Little wonder that the end of its production, which had occurred between Sadie’s troubled and separate San Francisco and Los Angeles shoots, marked the beginning of Chinn’s slow burnout that would eventually come to a head in 1987.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 