Heartbeeps

The first time I saw this movie I had rented it for my daughters. I was looking for a family type movie we could watch together. I was pleasantly surprised and my girls loved it. It is a sweet, romantic story of three robots out for an adventure to a distant tree filled mountain. They discover love and the meaning of friendship. My girls are grown now, but I own the movie and we still watch it occasionally.

Bernadette Peters is beautiful and Andy Kaufman is a riot. It was fun to see Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel (pre "Eating Raoul") at a party where the robots try to blend in.

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.

What a weird thing to just now discover: an Andy Kaufman-starring comedy about two robots falling in love and going on the run. I never even knew it existed until today.

Now, I must stress, this is not a good film at all: awful dialogue, slow pacing and practically no story at the center of it. The machines inexplicably behave like people, when there is no reason for them to do so, and the people characters may as well be machines. The movie fails entirely at making you care for any of them or buy into any of the nonsense taking place. But it's also one of the quirkiest films you'll see, with striking visuals all the way through, and technical excellence in all the other departments.

If I was to try sum it up in words, I guess I would have to say it was a cobbled-together hodgepodge of Tron, Sleeper, Short Circuit, A. I. and Batman Returns, filmed by Wes Anderson from a script by an 11-year-old written on a Speak N Spell.

So no, it's not a good film, but it is sort of charming, in an 80s time capsule kind of way, and a pretty thing for your eyes to look at the once.

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.