Heartbeeps

directed by Allan Arkush

Heartbeeps is a 1981 sci-fi comedy, directed by the director of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Deathsport, Allan Arkush, who later went on to direct Caddyshack II and a host of TV episodes and TV movies. The film stars notable, experimental comedian Andy Kaufman, Bernadette Peters (The Jerk), Randy Quaid (Independence Day, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation), and actor/director Christopher Guest. In the movie, Kaufman plays Valcom, one of four featured androids who’s heightened circuitry and technology allows him to articulate a vast range of understanding, from emotions to risk factor probability. (The robot character for Heartbeeps was actually a reimagining of a robot-character Kaufman portrayed in a failed TV series called “Stick Around.”) Peters plays a related model of robot in the “Com” series of android that allows for this ability level, and she shares her ideas to work together to leave the warehouse they are being stored in, to find the factory they were created in.

Along for the ride is a fellow robot from the same warehouse named Catskill (voiced by Jack Carter, he was a Borscht Belt comic-robot who smokes a cigar and tells bad one-line jokes, written by comedian Henny Youngman) and a helper-bot the two Com robots made named Phil (voiced by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead). They set out for the factory, unknowingly being chased by two warehouse workers for the robotics division to get them back and a prototype police robot called the CrimeBuster (which had controls made from an obvious Atari joystick controller).

The movie was a flop, not even earning a quarter of its $10 million budget back. It was Kaufman’s first and last major studio role, and it unfortunately spelled the beginning of the end for Kaufman’s overall career. A year later he would leave Saturday Night Live since being on that show since 1975, and two years later he would leave his renowned role of Latka Gravas in the TV series “Taxi” (a character who’s voice in this movie is one of Kaufman’s recognizable go-to accents). Roger Ebert remarked that the movie was “dreary and boring” and that “the makeup and effects were the real stars of this movie.” The strange thing is that it was produced by the then-reputable Michael Phillips, who produced The Sting, Taxi Driver, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however Phillips was later nominated along with Kaufman and screenplay writer John Hill for various “Stinkers Bad Movie Awards.”

On the flip side, the make-up work by Stan Winston was very detailed for the robots involved, and he was nominated for the inaugural Academy Award for Best Makeup in 1982. There were only three times I actually laughed out loud to this movie: 1) when Peters requests Kaufman’s character to slow down in a van they take off in, he says “Second request: denied” and asks her if she thinks the van will fit in between two trees, in which they crash; 2) when the CrimeBuster police unit corners them, freaks out, starts blowing things up randomly and shouts “Perpetrators will surrender now or I will be forced to totally overreact!”; and 3) when Catskill offers to trade his power source with Phil, Kaufman’s character wonders why Catskill’s battery is so much more filled, and then finds that his joke-quality level was on “Low.”

So anyways, should you see it? Eh. Do you like Kaufman’s old works? That’s pretty much the only reason I bothered to check this out. This movie was mentioned in a review that Red Letter Media produced of some other movie (couldn’t find the link) and sparked my interest because the concept and makeup looked so weird. I couldn’t believe I never heard of it, especially since the Kaufman remembrance pieces made in the 1990’s I watched never brought up the movie at all, just Kaufman’s obsession with making audiences uncomfortable. Because of that reason, some theorize that Kaufman got just what he wanted out of this absurd movie, saying that he enjoyed testing audiences’ limits. It just makes him look bad in the end, though, just like his title of being a “comedian’s comedian,” as if to say he was so “out there” that normal folks couldn’t even wrap their mind around every project he worked on.

If that’s the case, then Kaufman won with his involvement in this weird movie. However, for the legacy of time, it is slow and boring, and Siskel and Ebert said it best when they remarked that “there is no story, and what story there is in this film was done better in The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and even Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend.”

3/10 strong impulses from my Pleasure Center