Heartbeeps

As I write this, I am 40 years old. "Heartbeeps" was released in 1981, so I assume that it played cable...HBO?...the same year, possibly 1982. Either way, I would have been 9 or 10 when I first saw it. I remember that it played incessantly...and I watched it each and every time. I must have seen it literally 40 or 50 times, and I loved it every single time. I remember being entranced by it, but the exact reasons why faded with the years. I was left with just good feelings and good memories until very recently when I was able to see it again. I had certainly read about it in the past. I knew that it was supposed to be really terrible, indeed one of the worst movies produced in the 80's. So terrible that Universal took control from Allan Arkush and cut it to 75 minutes, plus credits, and so terrible that Andy Kaufman went on the Letterman show to apologize for it. I knew all that, but when I saw it again....I still just freakin' LOVED it! No...it's not the funniest thing ever or the best written...but, for me, it WORKS! It gets to me just the way it did when I was 9. The funny parts are funny, the tense parts are tense, the poignant parts are genuinely poignant. I can very well appreciate now that Kaufman's performance...especially his character voice... might be very annoying to many people...though, to me, not as annoying as almost anything Jerry Lewis ever did...,but what truly saves Kaufman's performance is that it wasn't his trademarked, detached smartassery...it was a genuinely sincere characterization with zero winking at the camera. I think that that very quality may have contributed to the detriment of "Heartbeeps" because sweetness and sincerity are anathema to the accepted Kaufman persona. Regardless, both he and Bernadette Peters were wonderful in this film, as were Jack Carter as the voice of "Catskill" and...very weirdly...Jerry Garcia as the voice of "Phil". Try as I might, I simply cannot find what is SO terrible about "Heartbeeps". It made me happy as a child...and it makes me very happy now. Screw the haters.

When we entered the theater, there was only one other person. He left about 15 minutes into it, and we left about 30 minutes or so. What a monumental waste of time. The theater actually refunded our ticket price. When we bought the tickets, the person selling them looked at us strangely. That should have been a huge tip-off. I always thought that Andy Kaufman intentionally tried to make the worst movie ever, as that type of thing was his bag (think him as a wrestler) If you spend money to rent this, you would be better to just flush the money down a toilet It is not even campy - it is just terrible

HEARTBEEPS is a movie about a pair of malfunctioning companion androids returned to the factory for repairs. A simple conversation about mutual shared functions progresses to a trip to the woods with a 'Catskill' comedy unit (that has a vocal patterned after Rodney Dangerfield). They determine that stealing a UPS P-600 type truck. They assemble another small child-minded robot 'child' to tote spare parts and begin to slowly treat it as their son. Meanwhile the inventory staff notice the robots were missing and begin a search, however, the overheard conversation with the factory boss unknowingly gives a malfunctioning 'Crimebuster Deluxe' robot the purpose to hunt down and return the 3 missing robots. The factory inventory employees are also now tasked with locating and retrieving the missing androids, but their paths do not cross with the overactive Crimebuster unit. During the story, both androids slowly discover their love for each other and the desire to make the best life possible for the child they built together. When the android duo deduce that their child will need to have some sort of purpose or it will be discarded or destroyed by the humans, the kindly scrapyard owners note that they should take their child to the factory to give the child a purpose. The android family now begins slow walk back to the robot factory, but their power packs are now running very low. The plot itself is fairly charming if you are not too impatient about the slow pace or the overly redundant dialog. This isn't an action movie or even a sexy romance flick, but just a simple lightly romantic science-fiction movie with rather good makeup and nice special effects (but the effects are not plot-mover item for the story as is common with the movies these days). It aims for a charming fanciful mindset and achieves it, but the pacing is too slow and the story dialog so thin that it really does not have enough "oomph" to give an emotional investment from the audience. HEARTBEEPS is a slow yet charming movie with sadly not enough script or philosophy to fill out the movie runtime. I find I rather like it for what it wanted to be, but many people will not appreciate that and be disappointed. I think this could be remade today (now that audiences are more accepting of science fiction in general) with a similar budget and a complex conceptually expanded script and succeed as a charming sci-fi family movie.

This is an expensive comedy that forgot to be funny and proved to be a huge flop upon release. Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters star as robots in a future time when domestic robotic servants are commonplace. They run away from a repair warehouse and wander the countryside, falling in love along the way. The cast includes Randy Quaid, Kenneth McMillan, Christopher Guest, Melanie Mayron, Dick Miller, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, and the voice of Jack Carter. The elaborate robots, a mix of costume and makeup, were made by Stan Winston. The partially electronic score is by John Williams. Despite all of that talent, it's pretty awful, with no real story, and the attempted jokes just land flatly, partially because I was expecting Kaufman's usual brand of humor and got something completely different. The failure of this ended whatever big screen chances controversial comedian Kaufman had.

Andy Kaufman went on David Letterman and apologized for this movie. He said he wanted to give everyone their money back if they had seen the movie. I'm not sure he was entirely joking. It's bad enough that you might want your money back, but it's stupid enough to keep you interested in watching it. I tortured my friends by showing them this movie. They enjoyed the psycho malfunctioning cop robot. Years later they still bring it up. I would put this movie on the same level as SuperFuzz.

OK, first, to all the haters: Get a life! I don't see why you even bother to post on these boards, when obviously you know nothing about cinema, robots, or people. This movie has an important lessons for all of us to learn about gender, stereotypes, relationships, and DESTINY. Really, we are all robots, programmed to respond certain ways to certain stimuli without thinking. How many times have we seen a sunset and made some trite comment without even thinking about it? I say, THANK YOU Aqua (brilliantly played by Bernadette Peters) for making me stop and think about the awesome power of mother nature. It's only when Val and Aqua begin to reject their programming that they begin to understand their true desire--to find love, and to flee the factory in search of a creative life. This movie should be mandatory viewing in prisons--just think of the dreams and hopes it could inspire in the inmates. maybe even they could overcome their "bad" programming and join the rest of us in a crime-free world. We can all learn a lot from these robots. I am a better person for Heartbeeps.

If you have witnessed Andy Kaufman's slant on comedy, you may understand why I avoided this movie of his for years. Actually, for most of that time, I couldn't see it even if I wanted to - video stores in my area didn't stock it, and it never appeared on TV. I had to rent it online when recently I finally got the courage to give it a try. My heart sank during the first few seconds of the movie. The comedy in this opening is both very familiar and unfunny, and the movie manages to sink further and further as it goes on. There's barely a story here, with the bulk of the movie consisting of the robots wandering around... and around... and around until you want to scream. It doesn't help that the robot characters are a turn-off. They don't have much of a personality (they seem very stupid - why should we care about stupid characters?), and their voices are very annoying to the ear. The makeup is good, I'll admit. But it seems odd that they spent time for the makeup when not bothering to present the rest of this world as a futuristic world (the vehicles of this world, for one thing, are present-day gas-powered vehicles.) It's even more odd to consider that no one involved with this movie realized along the way that this project was a train wreck.

"I presume you are here for damage to your mental circuitry." - VAL Mike Nelson made me watch this...he mentioned it in his book, "Movie Megacheese." I asked myself, "Why would Mike Nelson steer me wrong?" I now know why the bots never trusted Mike Nelson. The music is by John Williams, which is probably part of his payment to the Devil. In fact, I'm sure anyone who worked on this movie is probably in league with ol' Slewfoot, or is now cursed, from the Executive Director down to the guy who ran the catering truck outside the studio. Don't watch...for the love of God...don't watch!!! Not even making a copy and showing someone else will un-curse you...I'm doomed now, I understand this. I accept this. But save yourself...

if your first reaction upon seeing 'Heartbeeps' is HUH? you're probably more than justified. even if you don't find this movie appealing in a cutesy-poo, charm sort of way, you'll probably still find it a little off the wall and more than a bit absurd. besides the usual babyish, sentimental group that always gets hooked into popular schmaltz, and i've met many of those, some of us get hooked into this for the pure peculiarity of the story. as any fan of this cult comedy knows, it's about a couple of silly little robots who decide to run away and start a family together. i can't really tell you exactly what the appeal is to this, but for me, it kind of reads like some kind of live action Filmation cartoon from the seventies. it's pretty innocuous and silly stuff. but for some of us the appeal is strong and obviously with most, on a intuitive feeling level. Andy Kaufman's style of comedy was fairly idiosyncratic, personalized and individual to a point of egomaniacal. he was a young man suddenly thrown into the spotlight, like so many young performers, and either he had too many ideas, or knew too little what to do with all the attention, because all fame seemed to do was make Kaufman retreat more inwardly and become, at times, almost incomprehensible. i enjoy Kaufman but i can't always say i get him half the time. he was a very hard celebrity to make a actor out of because his performance skills were so different and hard to place in just anything. i can't imagine a better film for Kaufman than 'Heartbeeps'. the role seems tailored for his eccentricity. not to mention he seems eerily robotic and unreal in his role as Val the house Bot. i also can't imagine a better leading lady for him than the incredible Bernadette Peters. Peters is aways pure gem and she herself is a very individualized talent. without her and Kaufman this film would have been impossible. there's also a couple of funny cameos by 'Rock'n Roll' high school stars Woronov and Bartell. they don't have much to do, but they are hilarious as spoiled rich, yuppie-types who are perplexed by the robots who crash their party. this quaint movie memorabilia reads a little like 'Wizard of Oz', meets artificial intelligence meets Woody Allen's 'Sleeper' or something like that. whatever, it's amusing sci-fi comedy stuff. the only real cliché here though, is to call this little movie a enigma. no kidding. you think. a lot of people will probably find this movie hard to get used to because of it's kookiness. for other's, like myself, the real enigma is why this film is so appealing i just can't resist it. that's the part that kind of perplexes me.

Best Robot Romantic Comedy Ever, using the robots as the romantic characters, which leaves Short Circuit out of this category. This was Andy Kaufman's best effort. Bernadette Peters shows her versatility here with an amazing performance. While not a great movie in many areas, I'll award it a 9 on guts and quirkiness.