Memorable, crazy movie

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

'Heartbeeps' belongs on a short list of strange bad movies of which you have never seen their like and are likely to never see again. It is easy to dismiss a movie that is a total waste of time but even through it falls on its face you have to give this one points for trying.Somewhere in the future two robots named Val (Andy Kaufman) and Aqua (Bernadette Peters) wonder what else might be out there in the world besides a droll existence playing butler and hostess to their owners. So they break out of their slave state and go exploring.Along the way they meet an odd-looking comedian robot named Catskill and a boxy little robot named Phil who acts more or less as a surrogate son. Unbeknownst to all of them they are wanted. To prove it, hot on their tin tails is a mean robocop named Crimebuster.There really isn't much to say about 'Heartbeeps' except that Stan Winston's Oscar nominated make up effects are really very good. Other then that the movie wanders about searching for a laugh or two and comes off as a bad novelty item rather than a movie. This is the kind of bad movie that you can call terrible but not forgettable.

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.

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 really wanted to like this movie, but the pacing was just way too slow.It was a nice story, but it was really like watching a slug race.The movie would have been better served, if it had some more action. I don't mean anything grand, but at least something in the background.It could have also been helped by songs that set the tone/mood of the more lengthy periods that were absent of dialogue.It's been about 10 years since I've seen it, so I may have to give it another chance.3/10 or *1/2(out of four)