Heartbeeps

1981 science fiction rom-com

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A pair of robots escape the robot factory or wherever the hell they live. They make a baby robot and try to escape their pursuers, including a ruthless cop robot.

I'm not sure there's another movie this boring. With Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as the pair of lovestruck robots and Randy Quaid playing himself, I know that might be hard to believe, but it's true. Painfully boring. This starts with the robots falling for each other and then goes absolutely nowhere. The robots just plod through about eighty minutes and do almost nothing. John Williams provides some ambient tinkering. There's a comedian robot with a cigar who provides such gems as the one about how his uncle was killed by a weasel. ("He was sitting on the railroad track, and a train came along, and he didn't hear the weasel.") That just pissed me off. So did the title, but it wasn't enough to stop me from watching this. Heartbeeps? It had Kaufman in it, so I was intrigued enough to give it a spin. If you, dear reader, ever told me that you were going to watch this, I would probably murder you to save you from the experience. I'm not a violent person or anything, but it would just seem like the human thing to do.

Shane trivia: This is the only movie I can remember apologizing to. I kept dozing off while watching this. At one point, a robot says, "What are you--an audience or an oil painting?" I was awake enough to hear that, figured the movie was talking about me, apologized, and even gave the thing a weak pity laugh.