IMDb RATING
4.3/10
1.7K
YOUR RATING
Two household robots run away and try to start a family.Two household robots run away and try to start a family.Two household robots run away and try to start a family.
- Nominated for 1 Oscar
- 9 nominations total
Wally Ann Wharton
- Party Guest
- (as Ann Wharton)
Irene Cagen
- Party Maid Robot
- (as Irene Forrest)
David LeBell
- Forklift Driver Robot
- (as David Gene Lebell)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaBecause this movie was so poorly received at the box office, Andy Kaufman's "The Tony Clifton Story," a movie about the life and times of his alter-ego Tony Clifton, was scrapped by the movie studios.
- GoofsWhen the Crimebuster begins spinning and shooting at Val and Aqua in the junkyard, you can see Calvin on the rear platform long before his character ( and Susan ) jump on Crimebuster to shut it down.
- Crazy creditsBefore the Universal logo, Crimebuster introduces himself for over a minute.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Sneak Previews: Taps, Cinderella, Taxi Zum Klo, Heartbeeps (1981)
Featured review
HEARTBEEPS is a movie about a pair of malfunctioning companion androids returned to the factory for repairs. A simple conversation about mutual shared functions progresses to a trip to the woods with a 'Catskill' comedy unit (that has a vocal patterned after Rodney Dangerfield). They determine that stealing a UPS P-600 type truck. They assemble another small child-minded robot 'child' to tote spare parts and begin to slowly treat it as their son. Meanwhile the inventory staff notice the robots were missing and begin a search, however, the overheard conversation with the factory boss unknowingly gives a malfunctioning 'Crimebuster Deluxe' robot the purpose to hunt down and return the 3 missing robots. The factory inventory employees are also now tasked with locating and retrieving the missing androids, but their paths do not cross with the overactive Crimebuster unit. During the story, both androids slowly discover their love for each other and the desire to make the best life possible for the child they built together. When the android duo deduce that their child will need to have some sort of purpose or it will be discarded or destroyed by the humans, the kindly scrapyard owners note that they should take their child to the factory to give the child a purpose. The android family now begins slow walk back to the robot factory, but their power packs are now running very low.
The plot itself is fairly charming if you are not too impatient about the slow pace or the overly redundant dialog. This isn't an action movie or even a sexy romance flick, but just a simple lightly romantic science-fiction movie with rather good makeup and nice special effects (but the effects are not plot-mover item for the story as is common with the movies these days). It aims for a charming fanciful mindset and achieves it, but the pacing is too slow and the story dialog so thin that it really does not have enough "oomph" to give an emotional investment from the audience. HEARTBEEPS is a slow yet charming movie with sadly not enough script or philosophy to fill out the movie runtime. I find I rather like it for what it wanted to be, but many people will not appreciate that and be disappointed. I think this could be remade today (now that audiences are more accepting of science fiction in general) with a similar budget and a complex conceptually expanded script and succeed as a charming sci-fi family movie.
The plot itself is fairly charming if you are not too impatient about the slow pace or the overly redundant dialog. This isn't an action movie or even a sexy romance flick, but just a simple lightly romantic science-fiction movie with rather good makeup and nice special effects (but the effects are not plot-mover item for the story as is common with the movies these days). It aims for a charming fanciful mindset and achieves it, but the pacing is too slow and the story dialog so thin that it really does not have enough "oomph" to give an emotional investment from the audience. HEARTBEEPS is a slow yet charming movie with sadly not enough script or philosophy to fill out the movie runtime. I find I rather like it for what it wanted to be, but many people will not appreciate that and be disappointed. I think this could be remade today (now that audiences are more accepting of science fiction in general) with a similar budget and a complex conceptually expanded script and succeed as a charming sci-fi family movie.
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $12,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $2,154,696
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $407,464
- Dec 20, 1981
- Gross worldwide
- $2,154,696
- Runtime1 hour 18 minutes
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.39 : 1
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