doug wrote:
Heartbeeps, Jon, Heartbeeps! It will make you cry, it will make you cry…
Heartbeeps- Dir. Allan Arkush 1981
This movie (according to IMDB) got nominated for an Oscar; I at least hope that the Academy did the same for Judge Dredd and Short Circuit 2. I fully admit that I am a bit impressed whenever something can tick me off so much in 78 minutes just by looking at it, but seriously guys, I can watch this and you cannot.
I got this dare and was actually excited about it at first. I’d just finished watching “Severance” (which, if you like a good slasher flick, you should check out) and thought I’d be immune to anything for at least a few hours.
I’d never heard of this movie before and looked it up: robot love story with Andy Kaufman, Randy Quaid, Bernadette Peters, and the ever-radiant Dick Miller. It had to have something going for it, right? I popped this piece of refuse into my DVD player and found out that, though I’m a man of steel when it comes to watching terrible cinema, my limits can still be tested.
The Plot: Andy and Bernadette play two cyborgs that are put on the same shelf at the cyborg repair shop. They get to talking, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, they’re on a romantic journey to a tree they saw through the shop window. Since each could tell that the other would be pretty boring, they invited another broken robot (that was built to tell one-liners) to come with them to sprinkle a little “fingernails on a chalkboard” style grating onto the overall stink of their trip.
After realizing that they’re relationship is stupid and meaningless (this takes all of about 10 minutes in the film, but the audience will know immediately), they decide to–wait for it–make a baby! How reasonable! Anywho, the group of four goes, looks at the tree, then turns around to go back to the factory. Their apparently worthless energy cells wear down, and some factory workers come and pick them up in a truck. THE END
What makes it watch-able: This film is crap. Anyone worth a wooden nickel will get tired of the dumb way the robots talk to each other very quickly. Then, if they’re lucky, they’ll start to feel itchy all over, take a second to scratch, and hopefully when they look back at the screen will realize that this is going to continue for the length of the film and turn it off. The robots talk to each other with this pseudo-technical manner, but they are expressing feelings that a real person might think at one time or another–it’s supposed to be amusing and thoughtful, but it’s not.
Maybe if they were a little more boxy (like that one in the Beastie Boys video that fought the guy with the octopus head) it would have made a slightly more interesting impression on the viewer, but these were “cyborgs” and they looked, for the most part, like people. Wow, a robot that looks a lot like a person doing things that seem almost human; if that doesn’t blow your mind, you’re obviously not a total idiot (although, you would be watching “Heartbeeps”, so you can’t be too awful bright).
The little kid robot they make is okay (at least it looks cool), and there’s a 2 second long flash of a woman wearing a fantastic skirt, but, other than that, this movie, even at only an hour and eighteen minutes, will beg you to turn it off.
Times I had to avert my eyes: 0
Breaks necessary to complete viewing: 0
Overall rating from 1 to 10: 3
Most people hate bad movies. Some people like to make fun of them. Not me. I LOVE BAD MOVIES! This site is all about my love of horribly bad movies, television shows, and media. My friends have always told me that I'll watch anything. (Think I'm joking? Check out the list of things I've already watched under "categories"!) Now I'm going to put that to the test. I'm on a mission to find a movie so bad, even I can't sit through the whole thing! 