Heartbeeps (1981) movie review - Sneak Previews with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel

I’ll agree, not a great film. Not even John Williams score is that great, but it’s probably the best thing in this bad film.

I can't believe this movie even got an Oscar nomination for the makeup. Splash some metallic makeup on their faces and it's worthy of an Oscar nomination? Glad that it's only competition was "An American Werewolf in London" that won in the first year the category was introduced. No competition at all.

this movie was cute! I liked it....

The first minute was so boring i turned it off

it is very dulls... too bad, neat concept.

I've seen it. It's okay,but its pace is too slow.
Years later,Pixar would give us a better story about robot romance.

C3PO & R2-D2 inspired plenty of film ideas and scripts around this period

Even Andy admitted on Dave Letterman one time he said the movie was a flopped..he hated making it.....

They should have had Andy Kaufman improvise his role. That would have made it a whole lot better

One huge no-no just from watching this clip: Having the robots talk exactly like robots is much stupider and less believable than how C-3PO talked in the Star Wars trilogy. He used technical terminology, yes, but he also talked like a person and his conversations with R2-D2 felt very human.

My god.....

This movie is 88 minutes? I got achingly bored just watching a 1 minute clip of it.

Dreary, boring, and... whimsical? 😂

It's funny that Gene criticized Roger for mispronouncing Jean Luc Godard, then turned around and mispronounce the name of Lauren Tewes.

I watched this thing on HBO when it landed there in the early 80's, I must have been 5 or 6 years old. It took me almost 40 years to finally figure out the name of this thing based on weird patchy memories. I remember being horrified by that bear scene. What a strange movie.

The biggest mystery is how Kaufman, who lived to troll people, managed to get through this film without pulling out his Tony Clifton character and starting a fistfight with the director....

...the film overall is weak, but now it's a nice little gem from the 80's...

Gene's off by only a few minutes, in which the movie was technically 78 minutes long, but from hearing his review of only "the first three minutes" before the movie titles, it almost sounds as if we were watching a real "short film", added to a film that doesn't follow the same structure, that the first three minutes had. Call me crazy for saying it, but Heartbeeps became a film called "Heartcheaps", after seeing how poor and "dreary" it was all made.

It wasn’t the fault of the cast, more so the writing and the producers. The cast knew it was really bad. If the writing had been better, perhaps if they hadn’t forced Andy to do a voice that sounds like a mix between Foreign Man and Tony Clifton or cover him in prosthetics, with the right amount of creative control, this could have been really great.

Did you hear the one about the man who was killed by a weasel?



He sat on a railway track, a train was coming, and he didn't hear the weasel.

I learned that joke from Catskill when I first saw this movie and told it over and over again to my parents' chagrin.

I am so cringed from that clip…

Its on roku....unfortunately. 3/10

Oh my! Bernadette Peters....
The hottest woman on the big screen in 1980.
I first saw them.....ahem... I mean HER, in 1979's "The Jerk".
Haven't been the same since.
I was 7.

Before the thumbs rating system was implemented.

How the heck did Kaufman get railroaded into making this stink bomb? I wonder if he deliberately took the worst script he could find.

What makes the scenes so awful is that there's NO MUSIC. The scene where he's speaking to the "son" robot would be actually tolerable with some emotional score underneath it.

What??? They didn't even mention the CRIMEBUSTER! That is the best part of the movie! He has the best lines and is the funniest of all! Plus, the subplot of the movie is the chase from him. There is alot of philosophy in this movie. When they run out of batteries at the end, it is very sad. Did anyone watch it until the end?

Alan Arkush, director of Heartbeeps and Caddyshack 2. A legacy to stand by.

Someone with shaky nerves ventures into a cave for shelter only to be seen sprinting right back out a moment later while being chased by a bear. I liked it better the first time. ...when it was called "The Yogi Bear Show".

Film wasn’t the right medium for Kauffman. He thrived off a live audience.

I think its pretty good movie.

Bernadette Peters, The First Fembot.