Heartbeeps (1981)

Wonderful character development!

The greatest movie ever made..!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I absolutely loved this movie. Let me explain: I was 6 at the time ('81), and much of the production technology we have today didn't exist. Therefore my willingness to suspend disbelief was far greater. I was also not yet wise to such formulaic Hollywood devices as pointless chase scenes and badly scripted romances. I guess I would recommend watching this movie high on enough drugs to reduce you to the mindset of a 6 year old, and then you should be fine.

Val (Andy Kaufman) is a high class robot damaged in an industrial accident. He's put in storage next to Aqua (Bernadette Peters). He's a business robot and she's given more charm. They are joined by comedian robot Catskill. They leave the warehouse to gather input and are pursued by the Crimebuster robot. Robot mechanics Charlie (Randy Quaid) and Max (Kenneth McMillan) are sent to retrieve the robots. Val and Aqua build Phil out of spare parts.It's not cute enough to be adorable. The robotic acting forced on Andy and Bernadette leaves out the humor. Catskill's bad jokes only deaden the comedy. There is 1 or 2 touching moments if the audience can stay awake.

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.

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.