Heartbeeps

Studio: Kino Lorber Studio Classics

Feb 18, 2020 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Long before Cats welcomed audiences into the uncanny valley and Sonic’s teeth gave Internet kids something to raise arms over, Heartbeeps slathered Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters in off-putting makeup and plastic-y prosthetics for this incredibly odd 1981 comedy about runaway robots.

Val (Kaufman) and Aqua (Peters) are two highly advanced robots who’ve recently been returned to their factory for repairs. Val was built to serve as a valet and analyze lumber commodities, while Aqua was programmed to act as a hostess at upper-crust parties. Placed next to each other on a storage shelf, the pair fall in love as they watch the sun set over the mountains. Sure to have their minds wiped in the repair phase, they hatch an escape from the facility, accompanied by Catskill—a robot who, for some reason, is a Borscht Belt-style comedian—on a long journey through the surrounding forest. Along the way they build a helpless baby robot, tangle with a bear, and make friends with the local junkyard owners (one played by Christopher Guest.) The whole time they’re pursued by an over-enthusiastic police enforcement robot called the Crimebuster—an ED-209-type danger to human life—and a duo of employees from the factory, played by Dune’s Kenneth McMillan and a young Randy Quaid.

There’s a whole lot of strangeness happening in Heartbeeps, and that’s even true once you get past the bizarreness of Kaufman and Peters’ makeup. (The makeup work, by Stan Winston, was somehow nominated for an Academy Award—it’s hard to believe this movie so closely preceded his groundbreaking work in The Thing.) The movie’s pacing is very slow, even when the movie runs under 80 minutes; this isn’t helped by so little happening in the movie. (The robots essentially walk off into the woods, and then walk back, with shuffling, two-mile-per-hour baby steps.) The villain, Crimebuster, looks like a plywood triangle assembled overtop a dune buggy—the control panel, no joke, features an Atari 2600 joystick. The humor is also super-flat: even Catskill’s nonstop “jokes” are intentionally unfunny, and explained away near the end of the movie in a way that will make many viewers groan.

But, is it unwatchable? No. It’s bad, but there’s something compelling about it. Kaufman and Peters’ characters are likeable, and if you stop viewing it as a comedy and approach it as a kids’ movie instead—my four-year-old enjoyed it—the lame humor and sluggish pace are more forgivable. There are some very pretty nature shots in the movie, and John Williams’ bombastic score picks up the pace when everything on screen moves at a snail’s pace.

Universal knew the movie was a mess, and re-cut the film before its flop release. Kaufman himself famously joked on Letterman that he’d refund the ticket price for everyone who saw it, to which Letterman replied he’d better be sure he had change for a $20.

Director Allan Arkush graduated from the Roger Corman factory with the success of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) to this directorial assignment from Universal, and he seems to admit that he got in over his head. Part of the problem was that he was working with studio guys he didn’t know; another part was that it wasn’t a project he was passionate about, so much as he was jumping on a chance to get into the big leagues, and might have taken any job he was offered. Arkush is extremely down-to-earth and candid in the commentary he provides for this release, owning up right away that the movie was “a failure on every level.” There’s no bitterness or blame here, which is refreshing. Instead, Arkush—who, in addition to being a prolific TV director, now teaches filmmaking—critiques the movie’s problems as if it were being presented to him by a student, which provides interesting insights alongside the usual behind-the-scenes stories. One choice nugget? The reason why the robots move so painfully slowly—and, thus, the wind is sucked right out of the action—is that two remote-controlled robots—the baby, Phil, and Catskill—had very limited speed, and Kaufman and Peters were instructed to not leave them behind while walking.

(www.kinolorber.com/film/heartbeeps)

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