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It’s a new season of Pick Six Movies, and we are getting cozy with our future robot overlords. We’re looking at six movies all about robots and what better place to start than with a movie that almost no one has seen, 1981’s Heartbeeps! How could a movie starring Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters with music by John Williams be this big a stinker? Is Andy Kaufman-bot ready to be a father? And is the movie really just wandering in the woods? These questions and more answered on a new episode!
Pick Six Movies is a movie podcast where each season we select six movies, all related to a single theme. We examine the history of the people in front of and behind the camera, try to make sense of how and why the movie was made, then discuss each one in way too much detail to see if they are any good.
Pick Six Movies is hosted by Bo Ransdell and Chad Cooper, two life-long friends with a shared passion for discussing things they barely understand in an attempt to make each other laugh.
Speaker 1: Welcome to a new episode of Pick Six Movies.
Speaker 1: Let me start by saying Domo arigato.
Speaker 1: No, I'm not just thanking you, although we definitely appreciate you being here, but our season 26 is a set of movies hardwired to entertain you with tales of robots and robot adjacent Tom Fulery, a season we are calling Domo erigato.
Speaker 1: As with every episode, not only do you get me that's Bo Randsdal and my best pal Chad Cooper opening up the metal housing to see what makes these automatons tick, you get an introduction to give you some backstory on the movie and some interesting tidbits to make you look smarter at parties.
Speaker 1: And we do that six times every ding-dong season.
Speaker 1: We are kicking off this season with a tale of disgusting robot love and dead beep dads with the Andy Kaufman, bernadette Peters, miss Fire heart beeps from 1981.
Speaker 1: But enough of my amoring.
Speaker 1: Let's turn on the servos and march this unholy metallic beast of a show into your ears.
Speaker 1: Take it away, chad.
Speaker 2: In May of 1897, american satirist Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was traveling in London on a speaking tour to earn some cash to pay off sizable debts he had related to some unsuccessful investments.
Speaker 2: While in London, a rumor began that Mark Twain was gravely ill.
Speaker 2: This rumor evolved to the point where Mark Twain had died on his speaking tour.
Speaker 2: There is a legend that a major American newspaper printed Twain's obituary, to which he responded the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you hear the quote that the reports of his death are grossly exaggerated, but both of these are inaccurate, never happened.
Speaker 2: Here's what's a little bit closer to the truth.
Speaker 2: In May of 1897, frank Marshall White, an English correspondent for the New York Journal, reached out to Twain while he was in London to ask about Twain's poor health.
Speaker 2: The editors of the New York Journal sent a cable message to White requesting a quote from Twain, as he was reportedly on his deathbed.
Speaker 2: Twain was both amused and annoyed by the report portraying him as being on his deathbed and in poverty while in London.
Speaker 2: Twain responded in a handwritten letter.
Speaker 2: I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about.
Speaker 2: I have even heard on good authority that I was dead James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but as well now, the report of my illness grew out of his illness.
Speaker 2: The report of my death was an exaggeration.
Speaker 2: The misquote of what Twain said is attributed to a biography that was published in 1912, two years after Twain died.
Speaker 2: The biography includes the source of the misquote, where the author of this biography embellishes the story a little bit.
Speaker 2: The author states that the reporter White was told to send back a 500 word story if Twain was ill and a 1000 word story if Twain was dead.
Speaker 2: In this version of the story, white showed the request to Twain, who smiled grimly and said you don't need as much as that.
Speaker 2: Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.
Speaker 2: Twain himself wrote in his 1897 book, following the equator, that quote.
Speaker 2: I believe that nearly any invented quotation played with confidence stands a good chance to deceive.
Speaker 2: And Twain was right if you make something up and you play it straight, many people will believe it without any evidence to back it up.
Speaker 2: Although Twain never actually read his obituary, he wasn't the only famous person to ever fall victim to what is known as a death hoax.
Speaker 2: Following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, there were death hoax reports of multiple celebrities being dead, including Charlie Chaplin and Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 2: In 1966, rumors across college campuses began to spread that Paul McCartney was killed in a garg crash and that he was replaced with a lookalike to spare fans from unimaginable grief.
Speaker 2: In September of 1969, the student newspaper of Drake University in Des Moines, iowa, published an article titled Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?
Speaker 2: The article cited some clues From recent Beatles albums, including a hidden message.
Speaker 2: When one played the song Revolution 9 from the white album backward, reportedly, you could hear the words turn me on dead man.
Speaker 2: The article also cited evidence from the back cover of Sgt Pepper's lonely Hearts Club band where John, george and Ringo were facing forward, but Paul is turned backward.
Speaker 2: People do crazy stuff when they're high.
Speaker 2: Reportedly, this was the first time someone had published a Paula's Dead theory, but it wasn't the last.
Speaker 2: This was the age of Vietnam and there was growing distrust in establishments, including government and the media.
Speaker 2: People were susceptible to me, leaving all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: Thank goodness it's not like that anymore, he said, trying not to sigh heavily.
Speaker 2: The rumors of Paul McCartney's death were only fueled when their album Abbey Road was released, where the album cover featured the famous image of the four members in the crosswalk, with Paul Barefoot representing he Was the Corpse.
Speaker 2: John Lennon was in a white suit representing the priest.
Speaker 2: Despite multiple denials of Paul McCartney's death, including a denial by Paul McCartney himself, it didn't put an end to this rumor, mccartney told the BBC quote if the conclusion you reach is that I'm dead, then you're wrong because I'm alive and living in Scotland.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 2: Just the thing a fake Paul McCartney would say.
Speaker 2: But sir Paul McCartney wasn't alone.
Speaker 2: Sir Sean Connery ultimately had to appear in the late show with David Letterman in 1993 to prove that he wasn't dead.
Speaker 2: A rumor began when a close friend of Connery's died around the same time that Texas Governor John Connelly died, and this all got jumbled up in a Japanese newspaper report, leading to rumors that the James Bond actor was dead when he was not.
Speaker 2: With the birth of social media, other celebrities fell victim to hearing that they died through internet reports, including, but not limited to, tom Cruise, matt Damon, gene Hackman, george Clooney, beyonce, hillary Duff, jackie Chan, morgan Freeman, steven Cigall and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 2: There's a flip side to the celebrity death hoax, which comes in the form of a death denial conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: This is when someone usually a famous person dies, but the rumor is they're still alive.
Speaker 2: Most famously was the death of Elvis Presley in 1977.
Speaker 2: Elvis died sitting on the toilet, straining really hard to take a shit.
Speaker 2: That's a fact.
Speaker 2: Reportedly, elvis was a longtime user of opiates, which causes severe constipation.
Speaker 2: His use of other drugs, combined with other health issues, was a perfect combination leading to the king of rock and roll dying on the throne from a heart attack.
Speaker 2: By the early 1980s, there began to be rumored sightings of Elvis, starting with a sighting of a man who looked like Elvis in the Memphis airport, claiming to be John Burroughs, a name Elvis used when checking into hotels.
Speaker 2: Subsequent sightings in Kalamazoo, michigan, and at California's Legoland led publications like the Weekly World News to regularly feature Elvis Presley on the cover, promoting the idea that Elvis may still be alive.
Speaker 2: And for people checking out at grocery stores across the country, it really kept this idea alive that Elvis well may be alive.
Speaker 2: Actor Bill Bixby, who starred with Elvis in two movies, hosted two Countham 2 documentary specials investigating the conspiracy theories of Elvis still being alive.
Speaker 2: There was the Elvis files in 1991 and, one year later, the Elvis conspiracy in 1992.
Speaker 2: About this time there were rumors that Elvis actually made a cameo in the movie Home Alone, one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how you keep a low profile after you fake your death, rumors of Elvis working with the mob or maybe with the government as a double agent began to bubble up.
Speaker 2: There was a movie titled Bubba Hotep, starring Bruce Campbell and Ozzie Davis, which you should see if you have not.
Speaker 2: It's all centered about Elvis faking his death and swapping places with a lookalike, only to do battle with an Egyptian mummy in a nursing home alongside an elderly John F Kennedy, who also is not dead, but is now an elderly black man confined to a wheelchair.
Speaker 2: Trust me, it's even better than it sounds.
Speaker 2: And speaking of JFK, this phenomena of people spreading rumors about people being alive after they're dead included JFK Jr, who reportedly survived his 1999 plane crash and, according to the QAnon movement, he's going to return to be Donald Trump's vice president in 2024.
Speaker 2: What a world we live in.
Speaker 2: Tupac, shakur, prince, michael Jackson they were all the focus of similar conspiracy theories that plagued Elvis Presley, where they faked their death but were secretly alive.
Speaker 2: For many, these rumors are grounded in the hope that these entertainers would return to continue to make music for their most loyal fans or allegedly molest more children.
Speaker 2: But there was one celebrity who died and upon his death the rumors of him faking his demise were not started by his fans.
Speaker 2: They were actually started by those closest to him who knew him better than anybody else, which, by most reports, nobody really knew him at all.
Speaker 2: Andrew Jeffrey Kaufman was born on January 17, 1949, but everybody knew him as Andy.
Speaker 2: Kaufman was an entertainer, like performance artist.
Speaker 2: People regularly mislabeled him as a comedian, but Kaufman didn't tell jokes or partake in comedy as it was defined at the time.
Speaker 2: In an interview Kaufman told a reporter quote the comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him.
Speaker 2: My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best as I can.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 2: And that's perhaps the best word to describe Andy Kaufman.
Speaker 2: He was an entertainer and at times he had an audience of one himself.
Speaker 2: Kaufman grew up in New York and at an early age he found a love of entertaining others.
Speaker 2: He would perform at birthday parties as a child, overcoming early shy tendencies After struggling through school, kaufman eventually graduated high school and received a permanent 4F deferment to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: Following a psychological evaluation that he failed, the doctor who evaluated Kaufman said that he lived in a fantasy world that he had created as a child and if he was put into the military he would lose his mind.
Speaker 2: Kaufman proudly showed off the letter containing this report to his friends.
Speaker 2: Kaufman knew what he was doing and encouraged people regularly to believe whatever they wanted to believe.
Speaker 2: Kaufman began working in comedy clubs in the 1970s where he caught the eye of Bud Friedman, who owned the improv comedy club.
Speaker 2: Friedman took a chance on Kaufman.
Speaker 2: Now his act was a bit unconventional.
Speaker 2: So, for example, kaufman would come out on stage and set up a record player and play a recording of the Mighty Mouse cartoon theme song, where he would lip sync the only line.
Speaker 2: It was odd.
Speaker 2: It was a persona that he created as a child to entertain his sister.
Speaker 2: He would speak in a slightly high pitched, choppy accent and he would do impressions of famous people but would maintain the voice and mannerisms of the Foreign man persona.
Speaker 2: As audiences grew frustrated or accustomed to his inability to impersonate people, kaufman would announce his final impression, elvis Presley, where he would perform a pitch perfect impression of Elvis Presley, driving the audience wild, only to return to his Foreign man accent at the end.
Speaker 2: Kaufman's performances at comedy clubs in New York City ultimately landed him a guest spot on the first season of Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 2: In his performance, kaufman performed as his Foreign man character, and he comes out on stage and begins to butcher a story that has no real punchline.
Speaker 3: It was three people and they carried the biggest cannon in the world to Spain.
Speaker 3: So it was two boys and one girl and they carried the cannon to the highest mountain in Spain.
Speaker 3: So the first boy you know they are on top of the mountain and the first boy, he points the cannon to this castle.
Speaker 3: So he said to the second boy all right, hand me the cannonball.
Speaker 3: And so the second boy, he said I thought you had them.
Speaker 3: So they both turned to the girl and she said don't look at me.
Speaker 3: You know they couldn't shoot.
Speaker 3: They had the cannon, but they could not.
Speaker 3: They have no cannonball, they could not shoot.
Speaker 3: Do you understand?
Speaker 2: As the audience awkwardly laughs.
Speaker 2: An imitation of Archie Bunker followed this.
Speaker 2: That was anything but an accurate imitation.
Speaker 3: You stop it.
Speaker 3: You are so stupid Everybody's stupid.
Speaker 3: Get out of my chair, mithat.
Speaker 3: Go into the thing, but get into the kitchen making the food.
Speaker 3: Everybody's stupid.
Speaker 3: I don't like nobody's.
Speaker 3: It's so stupid.
Speaker 2: This led into an uncomfortable silence, as he forgot his next bit.
Speaker 3: Now I would like to imitate.
Speaker 2: The audience sits in silence with moments of uncomfortable laughter.
Speaker 2: The moments were so uncomfortable that Kaufman addresses his audience.
Speaker 2: Who is unsure what is happening on live TV?
Speaker 3: I think we should turn off the TV.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you are laughing at me or with me, but you know, trying to do my best and I forgot what I was going to do.
Speaker 3: I promise that.
Speaker 3: You know it's nothing I can do, but promise I will not be here again.
Speaker 3: But he's so funny about that, I don't.
Speaker 2: He grows so despondent that he begins to cry.
Speaker 2: I don't know what to do.
Speaker 4: I try to do my best.
Speaker 4: I try to do your love.
Speaker 4: I try to do your love.
Speaker 2: It turns into a rhythmic chant, leading Kaufman to play a conga drum that has been sitting on stage the whole time in rhythm with his cry chant and he immediately wins back the audience as they clap along and he dances on the stage.
Speaker 2: People didn't know what to make of this, but they wanted more.
Speaker 2: This was at a time when there was all kinds of weird shit showing up on TV.
Speaker 2: Joe Allen Flowers and his sassy old broad puppet, madame, would show up to spew sexy double on Tondras.
Speaker 2: Mime duo, shields and Yarnel would pretend to be robots on multiple variety shows.
Speaker 2: Fun fact, yarnel was Dot Matrix and Spaceballs, with Joan Rivers only doing the voiceover work.
Speaker 2: Swisk Mask Theater troupe Moomin Shunts they'd show up to pull toilet paper off their heads and they were often featured on the Muppet Show, which had its own flavor of adorable and lovable oddities that were injected into pop culture.
Speaker 2: Kaufman's flavor of entertainment was ill-defined and different.
Speaker 2: It was just the kind of thing that some people were looking for, and some of those people were TV producers who approached Kaufman to take his foreign man character and adapt him for the sitcom Taxi, where he would play the mechanic Ladka.
Speaker 2: Bob Zamuda, kaufman's longtime friend and writing partner said that the show creators of Taxi essentially bought Kaufman's foreign man character to turn into Ladka.
Speaker 2: Kaufman was encouraged to take the job by his managers and Kaufman agreed to appear in 14 episodes per season, but he wanted four of these appearances to feature his alter ego, tony Clifton.
Speaker 2: Tony Clifton was an abrasive, cat-skill-style comedian who took pleasure in making the audience hate him.
Speaker 2: This request was removed from Kaufman's contract after Kaufman deliberately appeared as Clifton on the set of Taxi, offending everyone and ultimately sabotaging any chance of Tony Clifton ever appearing on that show ever.
Speaker 2: Tony Clifton would open for Andy Kaufman at Comedy Club, sometimes being portrayed by his friend Bob Zamuda or his brother Michael.
Speaker 2: Audiences would show up to sometimes see Tony Clifton perform, expecting it to be Kaufman dressed up as the character, only to have Kaufman appear on stage at the end of Clifton's performance, revealing to the audience that they had been duped and that they saw a fake performance of Tony Clifton, all to the delight of Andy Kaufman.
Speaker 2: Kaufman's deal with ABC to appear in the sitcom Taxi provided him with a television special.
Speaker 2: In this special he decided that he wanted to interview Howdy Doody, the Puppet.
Speaker 2: He included a section titled has Been Corner At one point in the special.
Speaker 2: He intentionally aired static so that viewers at home would think their TVs were not working correctly.
Speaker 2: Kaufman appeared on the late night sketch show Fridays, a competitor to Saturday Night Live that aired, you know, on Fridays.
Speaker 2: In the final sketch of his first appearance he broke character and just stopped reading the lines from his cue cards and said he felt stupid.
Speaker 2: In the sketch, fellow performer Michael Richards, who would go on to play Kramer on the sitcom Seinfeld, walked off camera, grabbed the cue cards, brought them back on stage and threw them in front of Andy Kaufman in response through a glass of water at Richards, which ultimately led to Kaufman getting into a fight with a crew member on live TV before they cut away to a commercial.
Speaker 2: The fight, it turns out, was planned all along.
Speaker 2: Kaufman made multiple appearances on the talk show circuit, including the Tonight Show and most famously on Late Night with David Letterman.
Speaker 2: Kaufman became obsessed with the world of professional wrestling entertainment that is both fake and real all at the same time.
Speaker 2: Kaufman wrestled Jerry the King, lawler, after taunting him with multiple videos that also insulted his fans and residents of more rural areas.
Speaker 2: Their feud contained and included Kaufman suffering a neck injury from a pile driver wrestling move done by Lawler.
Speaker 2: The two appeared on the David Letterman talk show together, where Lawler hit Kaufman in the face, knocking him out of his chair.
Speaker 2: It turns out that all of this was staged but was not revealed until over 10 years later.
Speaker 2: Kaufman appeared in a film titled my Breakfast with Blasey, where he ate at a Sambo's restaurant with wrestling personality Classy Freddy Blasey.
Speaker 2: The film was a parody of the film my Dinner with Andre.
Speaker 2: In the movie, bob Zamuda appears as an admiring fan, which leads to a fight in the restaurant.
Speaker 2: My Dinner with Andre was directed by Johnny Legend, and his sister Lynn Margolisse also appears in the movie.
Speaker 2: Margolisse would later become the filmmaker behind the documentary-style film I'm From Hollywood, a movie that chronicles Andy Kaufman's exploits in the world of professional wrestling.
Speaker 2: Margolisse and Kaufman were romantically involved and she would be with him until his death.
Speaker 2: But let's put a pin in that for just a moment.
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman only acted in three films.
Speaker 2: Kaufman had a small part as a police officer in 1976.
Speaker 2: God Told Me To, a sci-fi horror film about seemingly normal people just killing other people and then claiming as the title gives away.
Speaker 2: God told me to do it.
Speaker 2: In 1980, kaufman appeared in the movie In God we Trust, two movies featuring God in the title.
Speaker 2: The movie was directed by, produced by and starred Marty Feldman, who you may remember as Igor from Young Frankenstein, among other films.
Speaker 2: In this film, kaufman played a television evangelist named Armageddon T Thunderbird, and that same film, richard Pryor played a character named GOD, a supercomputer.
Speaker 2: Peter Boyle was a con artist, louise Lasser was a hooker named Mary and Feldman was a naive monk.
Speaker 2: If you've never heard of this film, it's because it's not very good.
Speaker 2: And Kaufman's third and final movie is the subject of this episode Heart Beeps.
Speaker 2: Heart Beeps was released in 1981, and it's a sci-fi rom-com about two robots who fall in love.
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman starred as the movie's male lead, a robot named Val, and his co-star was Bernadette Peters, a female robot named Aqua.
Speaker 2: Normally this is when we talk about how and why the movie got made and then, towards the end, we'll throw in a few reviews of the movie.
Speaker 2: But we're gonna do things a little bit differently this time.
Speaker 2: See Heart Beeps has a 0% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Speaker 2: Vincent Canby from the New York Times described the movie as unbearable and felt the story was dreadful.
Speaker 2: Reviewer Gary Arnold said that he didn't imagine that the film stars would suffer too much because nobody was gonna see this movie.
Speaker 2: Siskel and Evert both gave it two big thumbs down, and even Andy Kaufman himself thought that the movie was so bad that.
Speaker 2: Well, here's what he had to say.
Speaker 5: When I made that movie, heart Beeps and it got terrible reviews and I rightfully saw it.
Speaker 5: It was a terrible movie and I'm embarrassed that I was in it.
Speaker 5: And I just want to say about that is that I did not write it, direct it, produce it.
Speaker 5: I had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 5: I was hired to act in it and because my name was up there, people think it was all my movie.
Speaker 5: Well, I just want to say to my fans if there are any out there, that I would like to personally apologize to each and every one of you for me being in that movie, and I mean the people who worked with me in the movie the director, producer, the writer.
Speaker 5: They were all very wonderful people.
Speaker 5: It just didn't come out right.
Speaker 5: The movie just did not come out right and I want to apologize to all of you who saw my name and you went there because you wanted to see me in a movie and you were very disappointed.
Speaker 5: And the truth of the matter is I am right now working with my lawyer on a plan.
Speaker 5: I would love to be able to personally give back the money that all of you paid for your admission price and I am right now working on a plan where I can legally do that out of my pocket, refund everybody's admission price.
Speaker 5: Well, make sure you have change for a 20.
Speaker 2: So the movie is terrible.
Speaker 2: That's not unusual.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of bad movies out there.
Speaker 2: This one had a lot of good people working on it.
Speaker 2: The musical score was composed by John Williams yeah, that, John Williams.
Speaker 2: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Jaws, Close Encounters, Home Alone that John Williams.
Speaker 2: The film was directed by Alan Arkesh, a collaborator of Joe Dante.
Speaker 2: You know Joe Dante, the guy who directed Grimlins and Piranha in interspace.
Speaker 2: After this Heart Beeps disaster, the film's director Arkesh.
Speaker 2: He went on to do a lot of work in television, directing the famous Dancing Baby episode of Ali McBeal.
Speaker 2: Good for him.
Speaker 2: As terrible as this movie is, it did receive an Oscar nomination for Special Effects Makeup, thanks to Stan Winston yeah, that, Stan Winston.
Speaker 2: Terminator 2, Aliens, Jurassic Park that Stan Winston.
Speaker 2: Now, for the record, Heart Beeps lost the Oscar for Best Makeup in 1982 to Rick Baker's work for an American werewolf in London.
Speaker 2: The movie was written by John Hill, who had limited writing experience and would later go on to write a few episodes for the TV show Quantum Leap and LA Law, among others.
Speaker 2: As for the cast, the movie also features weirdo, extraordinaire Randy Quaid.
Speaker 2: You can hear all about his life on our episode about Christmas Vacation 2, Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure.
Speaker 2: If you're interested, it's a bonus episode at the end of season four.
Speaker 2: Snl alumnus Christopher Guest, who's also married to Jamie Lee Curtis, is in this movie.
Speaker 2: Melanie Mayron plays Susan.
Speaker 2: She would later find success as Melissa Steadman on the 1980s show 30-something.
Speaker 2: Christopher Guest and Melanie Mayron play a young couple who live in a trash pile.
Speaker 2: As best as I can tell from watching this thing A little bit more on that later, Legendary guitar from Anjiri Garcia lent his guitar talent to provide sound effects for the robot Phil.
Speaker 2: Legendary comedian Jack Carter, who we last saw on Pick Six Movies getting eaten by an alligator in the movie Alligator, Season 16, episode two.
Speaker 2: That was a good one.
Speaker 2: Well, that Jack Carter.
Speaker 2: He voices the character of Catskill, the wise, cracking and unfunny robot.
Speaker 2: So we have all these talent to feed people this movie.
Speaker 2: But it's an absolute dumpster fire.
Speaker 2: And how did this happen?
Speaker 4: Now, reportedly the top brass at Universal Studios came in and said Well, sons of bitches over 20-century fox, they think they're the only ones who can make a movie about talking robots and all kinds of electronic doodads.
Speaker 4: Boys, here's a blank check.
Speaker 4: Go make a hit movie with gizmos and doodads from the future that we can put on T-shirts and lunchboxes and Halloween masks, and make little dolls and bullshit with ridiculously high margins.
Speaker 4: Who wants to get rich boys?
Speaker 4: Who wants?
Speaker 2: to get rich.
Speaker 2: Of course it was a huge success and people mostly kids they really liked R2-D2 and C3PO in that movie.
Speaker 2: Among other things, Attaching Andy Kaufman to the project gave the movie a little extra energy.
Speaker 2: Kaufman agreed to the project for one reason and one reason alone he wanted to make a Tony Clifton movie that he wrote with partner Bob Zamuda.
Speaker 2: Studios weren't sure that Kaufman and his alter ego were strong enough to carry a feature film.
Speaker 2: Sure, playing the lovable mechanic on a TV sitcom was one thing, but being a leading man in a movie was another.
Speaker 2: Heart Beeps comes out and it tanks miserably, so the Tony Clifton movie was destined to never be In that film it was going to be a biographic story of Tony Clifton's life where at the end Tony Clifton dies of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Two years after the release of Heart Beeps in 1983, Andy Kaufman went in for a series of tests at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with large cell carcinoma of the lung.
Speaker 2: Kaufman initially treated his illness with natural medicines and a diet of fruits and vegetables, but when he finally opted for radiotherapy the cancer had spread from his lungs to his brain.
Speaker 2: Kaufman appeared at the premiere of my Breakfast with Blassey in 1984 with a mohawk to help offset the effects of his radiation treatments.
Speaker 2: Then, on May 16, 1984, Andy Kaufman died at the age of 35.
Speaker 2: Or did he?
Speaker 2: When Andy Kaufman announced that he had cancer, friends and family close to him were suspicious that this might be another piece of performance art, Another show where Andy was the intended audience, watching the reactions of others for his own entertainment.
Speaker 2: Kaufman regularly discussed faking his death as one of the greatest hoaxes he could ever pull off.
Speaker 2: Bob Zmuda said in 1982 that Kaufman called him around four in the morning telling him he had decided to fake his death and insisting that Bob come meet him right away.
Speaker 2: Zmuda met Kaufman.
Speaker 2: Zmuda claims that Kaufman told him 30 years was the time frame for this hoax and that Lynn Margolese, the woman Zmuda identified as the love of Andy's life, would not be involved in this.
Speaker 2: In Zmuda's account of this plan, Kaufman found someone who resembled him, who was in fact dying of cancer, and over time Kaufman lost weight and shaved his head to resemble this body double.
Speaker 2: When the other person died, a switch was made with the double and that person was buried as Kaufman and Kaufman was spirited away to go start a new life, but this story may be a hoax perpetrated by Bob Zmuda.
Speaker 2: He was, after all, Kaufman's accomplice in so many of these elaborate schemes.
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman's early death and eccentric legacy of entertainment, combined with the rumors that he might still be alive, elevated him as an entertainment and comedy icon.
Speaker 2: Tony Clifton continued to perform at the comedy store after Kaufman's death.
Speaker 2: Many suspected it was always Bob Zmuda, dressed up in the famed insult comic outfit.
Speaker 2: Over the years since his death, rumors of Andy Kaufman's return began to increase, especially as the 30 year anniversary of his death grew closer.
Speaker 2: In 2013, at the Andy Kaufman Awards, a ceremony held annually at the Gotham Comedy Club, Michael Kaufman, Andy's brother, took the stage and introduced a woman claiming to be Andy's adult daughter.
Speaker 2: Michael Kaufman stated that years earlier, he found an essay written by Andy which included how Andy would fake his death.
Speaker 2: In the essay, there were instructions for Michael to meet Andy at a restaurant on Christmas Eve in 1999.
Speaker 2: Michael did so, and a man he did not know approached and handed him a typed letter.
Speaker 2: This letter, allegedly from Andy Kaufman, was read by Michael in front of the crowd at the Gotham Comedy Club.
Speaker 2: In it, Andy claimed that everything was great in his life and he just wanted to get away from being Andy Kaufman.
Speaker 2: The letter stated that Kaufman had fallen in love and now had a daughter who was 24 years old.
Speaker 2: At this point a woman appeared on stage being introduced as McCoy, a name that Kaufman used when checking into hospitals.
Speaker 2: Ed Kavanaugh, showroom manager of the Gotham Comedy Club, said you could see by the look on Michael's face that it had an emotional impact on him.
Speaker 2: When asked whether or not Kavanaugh believed the woman's story about being Andy's daughter, Kavanaugh said I don't know whether somebody is perpetrating something on Michael or not.
Speaker 2: I'm truly 50-50 on this one.
Speaker 2: Al Paranello, a lifelong friend of Kaufman, who also produces the awards ceremony.
Speaker 2: He was convinced of the story's veracity, even though he was one of the few people who attended Kaufman's funeral and actually saw his body, Because the funeral had a closed casket, with only family and close friends seeing Kaufman's body.
Speaker 2: However, the 30th anniversary of his death came and went and Andy Kaufman did not return.
Speaker 2: Is Andy Kaufman dead or alive?
Speaker 2: Your guess is as good as mine.
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman was slash is an entertainer who intentionally blurred the lines between reality and fiction.
Speaker 2: He had a passion for making the audience love him, only to confuse them and then anger them, then surprise them with a finale where people would leap to their feet and applause as they realized this was all an elaborate emotional ride, with Andy Kaufman leading them every step of the way.
Speaker 2: Shortly after Michael Kaufman's presentation at the Gotham Comedy Club with Andy's alleged adult daughter, Michael Kaufman appeared on the cable news channel CNN with anchor Jake Tapper, where it was revealed that it was impossible to reach Kaufman's daughter and that he now believed he was victim of an elaborate hoax.
Speaker 2: But what about Heartbeams, the final film featuring Andy Kaufman not as himself?
Speaker 2: Is it any good?
Speaker 2: We know the answer to that question from earlier.
Speaker 2: Of course it's not any good.
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman was going to refund everybody's money.
Speaker 2: We went to see this thing, but you know what?
Speaker 2: We need?
Speaker 2: To get Mr Bo Ranzel in here to discuss this movie from start to finish, to see what exactly makes this movie so refund-worthy.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, Aquas and Vows.
Speaker 2: It's 1981's, long forgotten for multiple reasons, Heartbeams.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: And welcome to Pick Six Movies.
Speaker 2: I'm Chad Cooper and I'm joined by the man who always makes my heart go beep, mr Bo.
Speaker 2: Randall Bo.
Speaker 2: How are you doing today, Chad Bo?
Speaker 1: I'm just a little bit of a fan, you know.
Speaker 1: We toss around phrases like the worst movie we've ever done, and every now and again one comes down the pipe that truly may be the worst thing we've ever done.
Speaker 2: It's in the top five.
Speaker 1: You know, we do movies that are poorly scripted and they're poorly shot and they're poorly edited and the music's no good, but there's like one or two little things that make it at least interesting.
Speaker 1: Foul's Love of the Damned is a terrible, offensive gross movie, and yet the performance by Jeffrey Combs is so wackadood that I can at least enjoy that.
Speaker 2: This is a tough one to get through and it's 74 Minutes Long.
Speaker 2: Which Boâ¦.
Speaker 2: We have a new Grand Champion of the shortest movie ever reviewed on Pick Six Movies, taking that title from its pat, which was 78 Minutes Long.
Speaker 2: Congratulations to Heart Beeps, which was also nominated for an Academy Award.
Speaker 1: But Chad let me ask you this this is sort of like the Heat Index.
Speaker 1: The length index of a movie isn't just how long is the runtime, how long does it feel?
Speaker 2: This one feels like good 212.
Speaker 1: This feels over two hours.
Speaker 1: There's an hour of just human misery that pads out this film Look.
Speaker 4: I was going to say the problem with this movie.
Speaker 1: There are many problems with this movie.
Speaker 1: I have never watched a movie that felt so pointless and aimless and by the end of it I was like I don't know what I was supposed to learn from any of that.
Speaker 2: I chose this movie to kick off this season for three reasons For the money, for the glory and for the fun, but mostly for the money.
Speaker 2: No, number one, it's 74.
Speaker 4: Minutes Long.
Speaker 2: Number two I'd never seen this movie but often thought about it.
Speaker 2: And number three it was the only way we are ever going to discuss the life of Andy Kaufman on this podcast.
Speaker 1: I understand all of that and it wasn't worth it.
Speaker 2: I was thinking about Andy Kaufman and I was trying to find someone.
Speaker 2: If you don't know who Andy Kaufman is or was, is there anyone today that comes close to what Andy Kaufman did when he was in the bright spotlight?
Speaker 2: The only person that came even close to it was Nathan Fielder on his shows Nathan For you, and even more so on his HBO show the Rehearsal, because Nathan Fielder is someone who blurs the line between what is real and what isn't on both of those shows.
Speaker 1: I would agree with that.
Speaker 1: I think a weird cousin of that is Tom Green.
Speaker 1: Like, tom Green is way too extreme.
Speaker 1: He's way too situated in the world of pure comedy.
Speaker 2: And shock humor.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And when you're in the neighborhood of jackass, being over the top and being shockingly unpredictable.
Speaker 2: I think that Nathan Fielder does such a great job of playing a character on his show where he manipulates the people around him and then he's the puppet master, but then, as the audience, he's creating the show, so he's manipulating us as we watch it.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: It's so multi-layered, and that was really what Andy Kaufman did.
Speaker 1: There's never been someone quite like Andy Kaufman before or since.
Speaker 1: No, because he truly loved the medium of television.
Speaker 1: He lived in a world of his own creation and he basically made reality match that world.
Speaker 1: And, as you said in your introduction, if the person he was entertaining was Andy Kaufman, that was okay.
Speaker 1: You know, that was enough of an audience for him to continue with whatever shtick he had, and that's what makes him kind of unique as a performer, because he didn't seem to have that gaping hole that a lot of performers have.
Speaker 2: I need the audience to love me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kaufman didn't have that.
Speaker 1: Kaufman had a need for the audience to experience something, but not necessarily to like him.
Speaker 1: In fact, if they hated him, that was just as good and sometimes preferable.
Speaker 2: I didn't talk too much about the Milos Forman film man on the Moon starring Jim Carrey, and I know that you're not a big Jim Carrey fan, and even less so after watching that documentary about Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman with all of that method acting and you know bullshit, yes, yeah, nonsense that he went through Great movie, though, if you don't know much about Andy Kaufman, it's a pretty damn good movie.
Speaker 2: I can't imagine how difficult it must be to play someone who is so enigmatic.
Speaker 1: It's a great performance.
Speaker 1: Thematically it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: I love Danny DeVito in that movie.
Speaker 1: I think he's wonderful in that as well.
Speaker 1: It's just terrific.
Speaker 1: It's a terrific movie.
Speaker 1: Courtney Love is even really good in that, yeah.
Speaker 2: I didn't get to bullshit that Jim Carrey didn't get some sort of Academy Award nomination for that, even if he didn't win, because he's really good in that.
Speaker 1: Despite how he got there, I still, you know, I always think back to that old story about Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, and it's called Acting Dear Boy.
Speaker 2: you know, when I hear stories of people acting like an asshole on sets, Daniel Day Lewis, when he became Abraham Lincoln, was walking around confused by cell phones and shit.
Speaker 2: You know what it is.
Speaker 2: Stop knocking off.
Speaker 2: You wear makeup and a wig and a costume.
Speaker 2: You're going to go back and order room service.
Speaker 2: You're not living in a log cab and jackass.
Speaker 1: There are actors I love and adore and respect, and anytime I hear that someone is like well on set they never allowed us to call them by his real name.
Speaker 1: We had to address them as the character's name my respect for that actor goes down like four notches.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're like oh, that's a real asshole move.
Speaker 2: Like you're doing a job, just do the job.
Speaker 2: You won the lottery.
Speaker 2: You're in a movie.
Speaker 2: You're a movie star.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do your job.
Speaker 1: Be happy, be grateful.
Speaker 1: Like, as weird as Tom Cruise is, you think he's walking around the set of Mission Impossible 12 being like call me Ethan, of course not, because he's doing a job he's more worried about.
Speaker 1: Like, I'm going to get shot out of a cannon, this time directly into a brick wall.
Speaker 1: It's going to be a stunt no one will see coming.
Speaker 2: If man on the Moon comes on TV I will get sucked into man on the Moon.
Speaker 2: It's one of those quicksand movies for me.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: And I also added to that list Hoosiers Joe versus the Volcano.
Speaker 2: The Dark Jean Lean Limited Sent of a Woman Back to the Future Searching for Robbie Fisher and Jaws.
Speaker 1: Sneakers is on there.
Speaker 1: For me, Sneakers is a good one If I hear someone say I'm interested in all kinds of astronomy and I hear that from another room, I immediately go in, and I've just buckled in for the next hour.
Speaker 1: That is a God tier Stephen.
Speaker 1: Tobolowski performance.
Speaker 1: And Ben Kingsley too.
Speaker 2: Robert Redford, sidney, portier, river Phoenix Dan Ackroyd Mary McDonald.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's incredible Again, we could sit here and quote sneakers all night, chad.
Speaker 2: I know, but let's just talk about heartbeats, all right.
Speaker 2: So our movie starts off and we see this pyramid shaped black robot car with a red police light on top.
Speaker 2: It reminded me of the deathmobile that burst out of that cake in the finale of Animal House.
Speaker 1: It's a cross between that and a Dalek from Doctor who.
Speaker 2: If you say so, I'll take your word for it.
Speaker 1: Don't pretend you haven't seen what they're everywhere.
Speaker 1: Chad.
Speaker 2: This police robot car is called Crime Buster and it appears up over the small ridge in the woods and it says my name is Crime Buster 0719.
Speaker 2: I'm a cop.
Speaker 2: I contain one million microchips, thousands of circuits and a couple of noobswiles.
Speaker 2: Then we get some like real nice 80s motherboards sparking and you're like, oh, he says he's top of the line, but something's a little off of this guy.
Speaker 2: And then Crime Buster barrels through the trees knocking over some small pines and he says I'm the deluxe model.
Speaker 2: And then we see a couple of skunks hopping about.
Speaker 2: And then Crime Buster sticks out this thin metal retractable arm and gives it a sniff.
Speaker 2: There's like a little bulb on the end and he goes yeah.
Speaker 2: Crime Buster then reveals about 10 guns of varying level of destruction and he says okay, shorty, no sudden moves or I'll shoot before anything can happen.
Speaker 2: Crime Buster just fires on this tree stump and it explodes in a ball of smoke and fire.
Speaker 2: I've not seen this type of explosion in the woods bow since Michael Kelly shot that grizzly bear with a bazooka and grizzly back in season 16, episode one.
Speaker 1: Talk about a better movie Chad.
Speaker 2: Shockingly.
Speaker 2: So yes, the movie is so much better than Heart Beeps.
Speaker 1: A million percent For one thing, it's got a thousand percent more Richard Jekyll, and that's what you want in a movie.
Speaker 2: You know we're going to get to this later.
Speaker 2: How much heavy lifting does the soundtrack do on this film?
Speaker 2: John Williams score is the only redeemable thing in this film.
Speaker 2: It's like picking the raisins out of some weird coconut salad Like this is edible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that is the only thing to kind of recommend it and it's got some moments it's not enough to recommend this movie Bo.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, you should stay.
Speaker 2: Oh, first off, we didn't pay for this movie.
Speaker 2: We didn't buy this movie.
Speaker 2: We watched some janky bootleg version on YouTube, which is available to you, if you know you have literally nothing else better to do in your life.
Speaker 1: There's.
Speaker 1: It also exists on Plex.
Speaker 2: I don't know, what that means.
Speaker 1: I know you don't, but if you are a Plex subscriber or you use Plex as a media server, and is that like crackles, sad, distant cousin.
Speaker 1: So technically Plex is a media server, like if you have a bunch of movies on a hard drive.
Speaker 1: Plex stores, it does the encoding and you can download the app on various devices and it'll play your movies from your storage device.
Speaker 1: But in the later years Plex got a little big for their bridges and they started adding streaming movies to the service so you can not only watch what's on your hard drive, you can watch other stuff that they've got streaming on their service.
Speaker 1: One of the things that they have streaming on their service is heartbeaps.
Speaker 2: So Crime Buster rolls off after blowing up this skunk and he shouts off.
Speaker 2: My job is to keep the community safe on the land, in the sea and in the air.
Speaker 2: And then Crime Buster fires a bottle rocket into the air and then becomes an amphibious vehicle, wading out into the water.
Speaker 2: Fade to black.
Speaker 1: Yes, and along with like that electronic score that you mentioned, playing to do as much heavy lifting as it can to make this movie feel like a movie.
Speaker 2: We fade in on the Universal Studios logo and you're like huh, we get some nice 80 synthesizer outer space music, followed by the opening credits which, bo, I did not hate because they are overlaid on the actual movie as it began, so I didn't pay attention to what was written in words.
Speaker 2: And here we see Randy Quaid and his older gruff warehouse working partner, max I think they're also drinking buddies In fact I know the drinking buddies.
Speaker 2: I think they're alcoholics In fact I know they're alcoholics and they're riding on this lift like a scissor lift and it's carrying Val, the robot played by Andy Kaufman.
Speaker 2: And Max tells Val, he says, hey, turn your head around.
Speaker 2: And then Val's head it's on backwards and it spins around and we get to see Andy Kaufman in his full makeup for the first time.
Speaker 2: Which my question for you, bo, is Andy Kaufman in blackface in this movie?
Speaker 1: I think technically it would be brown face.
Speaker 2: Like copper face, but still copper face.
Speaker 1: It's definitely questionable.
Speaker 1: It's definitely co-opting robot culture yeah.
Speaker 2: But you know, the crazy thing is it's not the most offensive and disturbing thing in this film.
Speaker 2: The fact that you can be in brown face to some degree as a white man and nobody talks about that means that your film was way more problematic.
Speaker 1: I suppose this is as good a time as any to say the makeup work is good.
Speaker 1: It's weird because there are.
Speaker 1: You can absolutely tell what part of the robot is a prosthetic effect and you know, we're blending the actors mouths and eyes and so forth in, so it's not convincing.
Speaker 1: No no no, but if it were in a stage production you would think that was really good.
Speaker 1: But being in a movie, you're like, eh, it's okay.
Speaker 2: This was, I think, the first year that they were given out awards for special effects makeup.
Speaker 2: So you know, the bar wasn't even set.
Speaker 2: There was no bar.
Speaker 2: This was the bar.
Speaker 1: Well, like you said, they had to do it for American werewolf.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think American werewolf was the reason that category was created.
Speaker 2: They were like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Did you see that?
Speaker 2: That needs an award?
Speaker 2: We don't have any awards to give them.
Speaker 2: Make up a category.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've got to do something, because that they, that guy, turned into a fucking werewolf right on screen.
Speaker 2: Now Stan Winston was a couple of years removed from the work he did on the movie the whiz, and the costumes for Val and Aqua look a lot like Nipsey Russell's makeup as the tin man in the whiz.
Speaker 1: If you say so, I've never seen the whiz.
Speaker 1: Shame on you, shame on me, chad.
Speaker 2: Diana Ross, Nipsey Russell, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Eason, Down the Road.
Speaker 2: It's so good it's better than Return to Oz, a movie with a creepy robot that I considered doing that for this season Spoilers.
Speaker 2: I'm not doing it.
Speaker 1: Is Return to Oz.
Speaker 1: That's the one with a young Farooza Balk right.
Speaker 2: Correct where it starts off, where she's getting electroshock therapy, that's a weird movie.
Speaker 2: There were a lot of filmmakers when we were growing up.
Speaker 2: They were like how could we psychologically damage children as much as possible?
Speaker 2: I'm like, wow, look at this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Hey, here's a wonderful fantasy film called the Neverending Story.
Speaker 1: Also, let's watch a horse sink into quicksand and fucking die in it.
Speaker 1: Does it come back?
Speaker 1: Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: You know how adorable ET is?
Speaker 2: Yeah Well, what if we kill him and turn him ashy gray and just throw him in a ditch?
Speaker 2: That sounds pretty good.
Speaker 1: What if he clutches at the air, reaching for his child friend who is also by?
Speaker 2: the way Deathly ill.
Speaker 2: So Randy Quaid says to Val, I see why you're here, shit is full.
Speaker 2: No, he says, I see why you're here.
Speaker 2: You have second degree appendage laceration.
Speaker 2: How'd that happen?
Speaker 2: And Val says in that serial accident, sir, I was waiting outside the programming building as instructed, but sanitation engineer Russell Percival well told me to quote get your ass up and over here, and I helped robots lifting refuse containers, and one fell on my foot severing my ambulatory circuits.
Speaker 2: And in this exchange we learned two things.
Speaker 2: One, the character Val can imitate other people's voices, which you might think is going to be important later in the movie.
Speaker 2: It's not.
Speaker 2: And second, we learned that Andy Kaufman basically had one character that he could do, the foreign man care Right, because he's basically doing Latka's voice through this whole film.
Speaker 1: It's sort of Latka without the accent.
Speaker 1: Part of it it's.
Speaker 4: Latka light.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, and wisely, charlie and Maggs take him up to this shelf and then just leave him there to get away from this thing as quickly as possible, because it's both creepy and irritating in equal measure.
Speaker 2: I want to talk a little bit about Val's appearance before we move on, yes, please.
Speaker 2: He's wearing this suit that looks to be made of plastic.
Speaker 2: It's got gray and white pinstripes.
Speaker 2: And, as we mentioned, his face is this light brown.
Speaker 2: That's problematic and we talked about these like face prosthetics.
Speaker 2: It kind of looks like he's recovering from third degree burns and Val's hair is this plastic sculpted hairdry that looks like a spirit Halloween wig for Reverend Lovejoy and he's got his bow tie and he moves like every human shaped robot in every movie ever.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of bending at the joint.
Speaker 2: It's me, but I get it.
Speaker 2: That's how we know he's a robot.
Speaker 1: Stiff legs, stiff armed Right.
Speaker 1: It's just, I guess, sort of a visual shorthand for IMA robot.
Speaker 2: I mentioned these two jokers in the intro.
Speaker 2: You remember Shields and Yarnel?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, of course I thought they were like brother and sister, but I think they were just like friends that were mimes and they hooked up with Marcel Marceau and in the late seventies and eighties they were all over TV and they would pretend to be like windup dolls or robot mimes were on TV a lot when we were younger.
Speaker 2: There was so much crazy crap on television when we were kids.
Speaker 2: It was like the internet before the internet, without all of the pornography.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was really weird, and the moment Sean stuff was weirder.
Speaker 2: Now moment.
Speaker 2: Sean's was where they would put toilet paper or like clay and like yeah, yeah, yeah, stretch out their heads and it was performance art.
Speaker 2: That was what I grew up watching.
Speaker 2: It was wild man, Wayland Flowers and Madam.
Speaker 2: That old lady puppet terrified me as a child.
Speaker 2: That was the thing of nightmares for me.
Speaker 1: Wayland Flowers and Madam did not freak me out.
Speaker 1: I was mildly sexually attracted to Madam.
Speaker 2: That's horrifying.
Speaker 1: I liked older women from a young age.
Speaker 2: Chad.
Speaker 2: The ever presence of Bigfoot from our youth was crazy.
Speaker 2: The Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness Monster those were all things that were widely discussed in books, newspapers and television specials.
Speaker 2: This movie is so terrible, Isn't it insane?
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman was doing impressions of Elvis Presley before being an Elvis impersonator was a thing.
Speaker 2: Now it's Kitchy and it's Vegas and it's all that.
Speaker 2: He was doing this as a pioneer in the field of impersonating this famous singer and as obsessed as he was with him and the legacy that Elvis left, intentionally or not, more not than yes of is he dead or is he alive?
Speaker 2: It's wild how much overlap there was between these two performers.
Speaker 1: Although there is not an Andy Kaufman as Graceland, which is unfortunate because I would like to visit that place.
Speaker 2: You think Andy Kaufman's dead or alive?
Speaker 2: Oh he's dead.
Speaker 2: I think he's alive, but I think what he did was so illegal.
Speaker 2: He can't come back without facing charges.
Speaker 1: I think that he died.
Speaker 1: You know pretty much the way that the report went.
Speaker 1: It's just that he had built up such a mystique and I think that there could have been the practical joke element of I'm going to write this thing that says I'm going to come back from the dead, and it's sort of his you know swan song joke on his way out the door to kind of hurl this grenade over his shoulder to be like, well, let's make sure that people always ask the question.
Speaker 1: But no, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think he survived.
Speaker 2: I think within the next 20 years, if you and I live long enough, there's going to be reports that he was alive and he died in, like chili.
Speaker 1: He died of chili.
Speaker 2: No, that he died in South America or whatever.
Speaker 2: And then like, this is what he's been doing and he's got you know his memoirs that he's written for people who still care.
Speaker 1: I thought you were envisioning a Kaufman S stunt where he, like, was buried in chili and then, you know, was going to eat his way out or something.
Speaker 1: And then, although I think that Chris Angel guy he might be down for that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would love to see some performance art involving chili, and I think I only say this because I didn't eat before we recorded, and now I'm thinking how delicious chili sounds.
Speaker 2: I'd like to see Guy Fieri buried in chili.
Speaker 1: I would like to see Guy Fieri buried.
Speaker 2: So Randy Quaid, he's there with Gus and he says you know, guys, some people use a Royals Royce to plow turnips because, he's really saying that that Val is a pretty expensive piece of machinery, so they stick him up on this shelf.
Speaker 2: Randy Quaid and Max they're getting ready to lower on the scissor lift.
Speaker 2: As they're leaving, kind of looks like they're in a Sam's club or like an Ikea, like it's way up high in the air, and as they leave they're arguing about the state of complicated robot technology.
Speaker 2: And it's a real like more complicated, less complicated, no, more complicated, like they're really getting at each other and then up on the shelf Val looks over and he sees Bernadette Peters as Aqua.
Speaker 2: Now Aqua has the same face prosthetics like with a burn victim look, and she kind of her face looks more like one of those two girls from the strangers or that killer from Alice, sweet Alice.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of frightening and Aqua's hair looks like she asked for the Marge Simpson, but instead of Cartoon Blue she got C3PO Gold, and around her neck is this fashionable neck piece that looks like an oversized Pringles potato chip, but at a 45 degree angle, and she's wearing a pink Boussier and her lips are this pronounced bright red and I love Bernadette Peters.
Speaker 1: Who doesn't?
Speaker 1: She's a national treasure.
Speaker 2: In this movie.
Speaker 2: I'll say I think that Bernadette Peters and Andy Kaufman are given at least 90, 95% oh yeah, of course they are trying to put together an honest and goodness movie here.
Speaker 1: It's just awful, Right.
Speaker 1: Well, they're sunk by the fact that there are no jokes in this script, so it's there's no comedy to be mine from it no.
Speaker 1: And it's so poorly edited.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I have seen a movie this poorly edited in a very long time.
Speaker 2: The director of the film brought in a final version.
Speaker 2: I didn't leave this in the intro because I just went there and he brought in a version and showed the studio and they hated it.
Speaker 2: So the studio got in and then they edited it down and it was just one of those a lot of cooks in the kitchen and then what you see is what you get.
Speaker 2: But I can't envision a better version of this.
Speaker 2: I mean there are better movies out there that deal with robots, but here here's the thing All right.
Speaker 2: In movies about robots, 99.9% of all of them fall into three categories.
Speaker 2: Number one, the examination of what it means to be human, where we deal with kind of robots wrestling with ideas like love and sacrifice.
Speaker 2: Number two is where robots are movies and there's the examination of what it's like to be God the creator as a human, where you've made this thing and you have this existential crisis of this quote living being.
Speaker 2: And then, number three, there's the robot movies, where just the robots are trying to kill all the humans as an antagonist and they're basically like zombies.
Speaker 2: That's almost every single robot movie that's out there.
Speaker 1: I agree with all of this, yes.
Speaker 2: You know it's a good robot movie that we're not going to do.
Speaker 1: Robot and Frank.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Robot and Frank.
Speaker 2: That flips the script where Franklin Jella plays Frank.
Speaker 2: I like that Don't have to know which one's Frank and which one's a robot.
Speaker 2: But I love that movie because.
Speaker 1: Call me Skeletor robot so good.
Speaker 2: He's so good and Susan Sarandon is so good in it Everybody's good in that movie, but that's a movie where you have a character who is paired up with a robot, but it is more about a human being dealing with the fragility of old age and what it means to lose your memory, and the robot serves as a catalyst and a mirror to that process.
Speaker 2: It is a gem of a film.
Speaker 2: If you've never seen it, watch it and you won't be disappointed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not a dry eye in the house at the end of that.
Speaker 2: Damn.
Speaker 2: That's a good film, Unlike Heartbebes, which is terrible.
Speaker 1: We've almost talked about for a solid six minutes in the course of this conversation.
Speaker 2: Another thing, just because I don't want to talk about this movie.
Speaker 2: In the 80s, steve Gutenberg and Ally Sheedy made Short Circuit.
Speaker 2: Well, they were in Short Circuit.
Speaker 2: They didn't make that movie and arguably that is a better film that deals with the topics that are danced around in Heartbebes, because you have a machine, a robot, that slowly begins to understand ideas of life and death and consciousness, and love and compassion.
Speaker 2: This movie feels like it wants to do all of that and it does none of that.
Speaker 1: Right For a movie that's all about robots becoming sentient and experiencing emotion, like Short Circuit comes along a few years later and gets all of that right and manages to be charming, although it does have an extremely problematic performance at the center of that movie.
Speaker 2: With Fisher Stevens doing his best impersonation of Hank Azaria doing his impersonation of Appu.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really bad.
Speaker 2: He's the star of the sequel Short Circuit 2.
Speaker 2: Tim and Michael McKee and running around with Johnny Five.
Speaker 1: But the movie itself, short Circuit as a film, despite that aspect of it, is actually a really charming story about this robot that's alive and wanting to be independent and you can root for him because he's an underdog and he's being chased by the authorities.
Speaker 1: And in this movie you have a robot or a series of robots who are gaining sentience, but that's never really addressed.
Speaker 1: Like, short Circuit involves the robot character sort of demanding to be acknowledged as a real living, thinking, feeling creature, where it's like Johnny Five is alive, you know, and this movie there are hints of that where they sort of talk around the idea of these robots gaining some kind of sentience.
Speaker 1: But there is no room for that kind of subtlety in a movie that also features the crime buster busting through the wall of a dinner party.
Speaker 1: No, it's just so wildly all over the place in terms of what it's trying to accomplish and doesn't exactly know how to get there.
Speaker 1: It feels like such a like a first draft of an idea and not even a script Because, like, once we get to the setup of the movie, the rest of the movie is just wandering around in the woods.
Speaker 2: You're right.
Speaker 2: So we get Val and Aqua and they're standing on the ledge of BJs or Costco or whatever which, by the way, how is BJs the name of the store?
Speaker 2: Like Dick Sporting Good Store?
Speaker 2: Didn't somebody come in and like come on, guys, what are we doing?
Speaker 1: I like the fact that BJs does sound like a strip club.
Speaker 1: Sure, or like a strip club, that also.
Speaker 1: You know, wink, wink, the ladies will give you a little something extra if you know how to ask, right.
Speaker 2: That matter, dicks could be a strip club.
Speaker 2: The guys will give you a little something extra if you know how to ask for a wink, wink.
Speaker 1: You don't have to know how to ask a dick, so you're just like I'm here for dick.
Speaker 1: They're like we know what you want, right, dick?
Speaker 2: like in bachelor party when that guy remember he put his big old cock in that hot dog bun and that lady yanked on it.
Speaker 2: She's like I had a man's wiener right in my hand.
Speaker 2: Look how much we're avoiding talking about heartbeats.
Speaker 1: You know what else is?
Speaker 1: An obscure Tom Hanks movie from the 80s.
Speaker 1: He knows you're alone.
Speaker 1: It was one of his early performances, chad.
Speaker 1: He's barely in it, but his head ends up in a fish tank.
Speaker 2: You know well, honestly, Dungeons and Dragons, that's the movie.
Speaker 1: If you're really going to talk about his the movie you're thinking of is Mesa's and Monster's, or in a Jaffes, mesa's and Monster's, which is a TV movie.
Speaker 1: Also start Chris Makepeace, which, if you want to do a little, six degrees of Kevin Bacon with that.
Speaker 1: Chris Maypeace.
Speaker 1: Also, rudy the rabbit from Meatballs, which connects Bill Murray and Tom Hanks, who were recently together in Ash Street City.
Speaker 2: There we go.
Speaker 2: The movie fades in and out of shots of Val and Aqua standing on this shelf and often the distance.
Speaker 2: We finally get a shot of them from the back and there's this wall of windows looking out over the mountains and as the sun is going down, aqua says beautiful, isn't it?
Speaker 2: And Val says why threats the purpose of that piece of communication?
Speaker 2: And Aqua says I was practicing social conversation.
Speaker 2: And Val responds I presume you are here for damage to your mentor circuitry.
Speaker 2: And then these two chit chat about how they're being reprogrammed and how their social robots and Aqua's job is to work poolside and be entertaining.
Speaker 2: And I was like good guys, this like a season one Westworld or X Machina situation, because that's gonna be badly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, val's like.
Speaker 1: I am a cup of specializing instruction buns and you're like, oh my God, like there is nothing likeable about this robot at all.
Speaker 1: It's boring as shit.
Speaker 1: Even C3PO, which was a little highfalutin for a robot.
Speaker 1: But you could kind of get behind C3PO a little bit because he was kind of a jerk Thought, he was above manual labor and so forth.
Speaker 1: It was always picking on R2-D2 and it gave you like it was.
Speaker 1: It didn't make it more likeable, but it gave you a reason to be interested in him.
Speaker 2: You weren't so sad when he got his legs blowed off in part two.
Speaker 1: Oh no, he'd been asking for that for you know an entire movie.
Speaker 2: Val asks Aqua, concerning your observation of the proximity of the sun and the mountains, what would be an appropriate response?
Speaker 2: And Aqua responds in this Patrick Warburton-esque voice oh yeah, that was something.
Speaker 2: So what, gonna get you a drink?
Speaker 2: And then Aqua tells him that as a woman, she would reply oh, thank you, I'll have a banana daiquiri.
Speaker 2: Which barf who orders a banana daiquiri?
Speaker 2: Nobody, a 15 year old down in Cabo San Lucas or something.
Speaker 2: Because they heard it in a shitty movie like this.
Speaker 1: All right, someplace that doesn't have a legal drinking age.
Speaker 2: Help pull advice.
Speaker 2: You don't know what to order when you go up to a bar.
Speaker 2: Come up and just say like, give me a whiskey and that's it.
Speaker 2: And if they say they don't have whiskey, say hell, son, then just give me a beer.
Speaker 1: We call that the mojo Nixon, where I'm from.
Speaker 1: After this exchange, they just go back to staring out this big window as night falls and one presumes, or one is supposed to believe, I think that like, oh, this is the sweet moment where they're starting to connect, although it doesn't ever feel like that, and this is one of those things that's hard to convey, where a movie just fails to get to the emotional moment that it needs to get to.
Speaker 1: And so later on, val looks back at Aqua and says a further inquiry, please.
Speaker 1: What would happen after the inquiry about the daiquiri?
Speaker 1: And she says, oh, very bad, bantu, to help the man feel more viral and interesting.
Speaker 1: And then this storm rolls in across the Valley and lightning strikes this tree outside and bells it and they move a little closer together and you see their hands touch.
Speaker 1: This is the point of my notes.
Speaker 1: Chad, where I wrote to myself you know what didn't make it into man on the moon.
Speaker 4: Anything about heartbebes.
Speaker 2: You are right.
Speaker 2: I don't want this movie to be any longer than it is.
Speaker 2: If anything, I wish it would have been shorter.
Speaker 2: Okay, but I don't know that.
Speaker 2: Pick six movies we make your movie less worse can help make this movie less worse, but what this movie is missing is about 10 minutes on the front where we get to meet Val or Aqua in their natural habitat and then you get that spark of this robot is a little bit different later on when he tells lies, later on when they break into the hardware store that he's becoming sentient.
Speaker 2: He is thinking differently, which is what Westworld did, or the TV show, not the movie, where you introduce these moments of this artificial intelligence beginning to think differently about things.
Speaker 2: And you don't get that because there's no motivation for any of the characters in this film other than vows saying let's go look at some trees and it's like like what is this door to the Explorer?
Speaker 2: What are we doing?
Speaker 2: There's a better three act structure in an episode of door to the Explorer than there is in this movie.
Speaker 1: There is no three act structure to this.
Speaker 1: Again, it is set up walk around in the woods, then pay off the pain, yeah, yeah and yeah, and Dave's ex junk pile.
Speaker 1: While this is going on, we see that the crime buster is being tested inside also.
Speaker 1: Charlie and Max then roll by with.
Speaker 1: Catskill is the name of this robot, the fucking bane of my existence in this movie.
Speaker 2: It looks like an oversized gangster cartoon who is currently and perpetually suffering a stroke on the left side of its mouth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be a mafia bot, it could be a rich boss bot, but it what it is is.
Speaker 1: It's a Catskill comic with this cigar in one hand.
Speaker 2: Who builds this robot bow to tell shitty jokes and who are they telling him to?
Speaker 2: What is the need for this in the world in which this movie takes place?
Speaker 2: I'll bet a dollar this came from the same jackasses that made those singing Billy Bass fish in the 90s.
Speaker 1: I think it came straight from Guantanamo, chad.
Speaker 1: That's where it's rolling around and they're just like well, talk will say anything, nope, nope.
Speaker 1: You've got two more mother-in-law jokes.
Speaker 2: And I didn't even write down the majority of the stupid jokes he tells, because some of them aren't even jokes, they're not even set up and punchline, they're just hell.
Speaker 2: They sound like something that Andy Kaufman would have said.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: I posited to you when you were expressing how disappointed you were that I chose that I wanted to do this movie to kick off the season, that I was like maybe Andy Kaufman made this movie knowing it would be bad and he was like just watch him flush the movie down the toilet.
Speaker 2: But having watched, I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 2: I think that Andy Kaufman is trying his best.
Speaker 2: It's just everything about this is so terrible.
Speaker 1: I agree with that.
Speaker 1: I think that he is trying in this.
Speaker 1: I think Bernadette Peters is trying, I think even Randy Quaid and Keith McMillan is Charlie and Max like they are trying to make a movie here.
Speaker 1: But it's just shit.
Speaker 1: Charlie is talking about how he's glad he got to see this like Crime Buster deluxe model in person.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile they're testing this thing on a firing range.
Speaker 1: You know, it's one of those things where figures pop up from behind walls and move across like a shooting gallery kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, little cutouts of like a bandit with a mask and a stripe shirt and he shoots that one.
Speaker 2: And then a little girl pops up with a balloon.
Speaker 2: He doesn't shoot her, but then an old lady pushing a baby carriage comes wiggling across from left to right and Crime Buster incinerates the two of the flamethrower.
Speaker 1: Right, and it's not a men in black thing where Crime Buster is like well, you can see that little girl had a physics book and that's way out of her league.
Speaker 1: You know, this is just a malfunction but then they just in that scene.
Speaker 2: We just cut away from that like that's over.
Speaker 2: Is he not trustworthy?
Speaker 1: Right, doesn't matter, because it never comes up again in the movie.
Speaker 1: There are so many scenes in this movie where it ends abruptly in a way that you think that there's going to be some later payoff to this and there just isn't.
Speaker 2: There's easily eight moments in a very short film where that happens over and over again.
Speaker 2: So we come back to Val and Aqua and they're up on their shelf and they're staring out this Bay of Windows and it's the day after the storm and out in the distance there's a double rainbow and Aqua says can you identify that atmospheric phenomenon?
Speaker 2: And Val says yes, it is a rainbow.
Speaker 2: Can you detect all of the colors of the human eye?
Speaker 2: And Aqua says yes, plus three more.
Speaker 2: And then Val inexplicably says we would be very compatible for many different functions.
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: And Aqua inexplicably equally says the same thing.
Speaker 2: Crossed my grid and then they just stand there blinking.
Speaker 2: And also when Aqua blinks it makes this loud clicking sound and it reminded me of when Squidward would blink and it would make that tiny fart noise.
Speaker 2: On SpongeBob SquarePants, I could probably just said SpongeBob, I don't think I need to add SquarePants to it.
Speaker 2: Seems like it goes without saying.
Speaker 1: You don't run into a lot of SpongeBob's that aren't SquarePants, and likewise you don't run into a lot of like Frank SquarePants, like oh of the New Hampshire SquarePants.
Speaker 2: Yes, fun story.
Speaker 2: Originally he was going to be called SpongeBoy SquarePants, but SpongeBoy was trademark and they had to change it to SpongeBob, and thus animation history was made Bo.
Speaker 1: Is that something we can talk about for about another 45 minutes and then just in the show?
Speaker 2: Or we could just stop right now and go to the next episode.
Speaker 2: Oh, boy, Look we're actually obligated to talk through the whole movie, Otherwise they take our thumbs.
Speaker 1: That's true, and I've only got one left after hitting the abort on some Michael Manson movie, I'm sure.
Speaker 1: So Max and Charlie are bringing Catskill up to this platform.
Speaker 2: Gus asks Catskill, here, can you function?
Speaker 2: And Catskill says hey, can I function?
Speaker 2: Can you function?
Speaker 2: Put on a bump.
Speaker 2: And I was like that's not a joke, that is an.
Speaker 2: I know you are, but what am I?
Speaker 1: Right, then he the one he tells is a guy goes up to a retail manager and says hey, I got a leak in my sink.
Speaker 1: And the manager says well, the customer's always right, I guess because you know it's about peeing in a sink.
Speaker 1: The thing that's frustrating about this is that the characters in the movie, like Max and Charlie, are like oh, this is fucking terrible, we have to get away from this thing.
Speaker 1: And as they're leaving, catskill says hey, did you hear the joke about the guy who got killed by the weasel?
Speaker 1: Gus takes the bait.
Speaker 1: They stop, it's Max, it's the Max.
Speaker 2: That is not.
Speaker 2: It was Gus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's Max.
Speaker 2: Shit.
Speaker 2: You can tell how little I paid attention to this movie.
Speaker 1: It's fine.
Speaker 1: So Max is like, hey, I got to hear this.
Speaker 1: And Charlie is like no man, trust me on this, you do not want any part of this, let's go.
Speaker 1: And so the thing descends, and then there's a beat, and then it comes back up and Max is like I got to hear this.
Speaker 1: So so what about the guy who got killed by the weasel?
Speaker 1: And Catskill says he's laid down on a railroad track and fell asleep.
Speaker 1: And then he didn't hear the weasel.
Speaker 1: Wait.
Speaker 1: So you're just substituting the word weasel for whistle.
Speaker 2: He didn't get killed by a weasel or a whistle, he got killed by a train.
Speaker 2: Right Like your premise is flawed, sir.
Speaker 1: And disgusted the two men to send back on the cherry picker.
Speaker 1: And it's actually a moment that I hesitate to say I like it, because I don't really like anything about this movie.
Speaker 1: But at least was a moment like if this had been the tone of the film, I could have gotten behind it a little more.
Speaker 2: You mean where the people in the movie were hating the movie as much as you did Right when.
Speaker 1: Charlie is like you dumb son of a bitch.
Speaker 1: I told you this was not going to be worth it, and here we are.
Speaker 2: But it's crazy how little they're in the movie.
Speaker 1: Oh, I know there's just cutaways to them walking through the woods.
Speaker 1: To.
Speaker 1: Anyway, we'll get to all this.
Speaker 2: So later that night Catskill is asleep and snoring, because robots snore, and Val looks off into the distance and he says I'm trying to study those trees In the distant mountains.
Speaker 2: I need a companion to go with me to collect data on a field trip.
Speaker 2: And Aqua says I'm the nearest unit.
Speaker 2: Would I be compatible?
Speaker 2: And then Aqua and Val, they decide they're going to wander off to go hang out in the woods.
Speaker 2: And then Catskill wakes up and he decides he's going to follow.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: There's no reason for any of this to happen whatsoever.
Speaker 2: This movie fails to give us any reason as to why they're going on this trip, other than Val wants to go look at some trees, because earlier he said he was involved with the stock market and he's a valet.
Speaker 2: Now he's an arborist.
Speaker 2: Also, how do they get off the shelf though?
Speaker 2: They're like 30 feet in the air Because of movie I know.
Speaker 2: So we got to Max and Randy Quaid and they're playing poker with Mr Futterman from Gremlins and they're chit-chatting about robots because that's all they really talk about and in the background Val Aqua and Catskill just wander by this wide open bank of windows.
Speaker 2: Randy Quaid clearly should have seen them, unless he suffers from tunnel vision.
Speaker 2: And then Val Aqua and Catskill, they get in a work van and Val says I will drive.
Speaker 2: Then they take off and we see this van speeding down the road like it's a love bug movie.
Speaker 2: It's all in this sped up fast motion that is wholly out of place in this movie.
Speaker 1: Burn it that.
Speaker 1: Peters, as Aqua is like Val, will you please drive slower, because my anxiety circuits are overloading and he's like no, shut up.
Speaker 1: I know what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: Don't make me backhand you.
Speaker 1: Do you want to taste my ring?
Speaker 2: finger.
Speaker 2: They say that words hurt as hard as a fist.
Speaker 2: Do you want to find out?
Speaker 1: This movie took a turn.
Speaker 4: Ike Turner Incorporated.
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 1: I will smack your ass back to not push.
Speaker 2: So we come back to the warehouse and Mr Fuderman from Gremlas, he's wandering around he notices that three of the robots are missing and he goes over to Gus and Charlie and he's like hey guys what happened to those robots?
Speaker 2: And they're like, oh shit, they're gone, whoa.
Speaker 2: So then we come back to the van and Val's driving and he knocks over a white picket fence.
Speaker 2: Then we go back to the warehouse and there's a manager of the warehouse who's played by some character actor whose name I didn't bother to write down, and he just shows out God damn it, which then wakes up the rolling assassination machine known as Crime Buster in this movie, and I really like that.
Speaker 2: God damn.
Speaker 2: It was his like wake up phrase, because I thought, how awesome would that be if that was what got your Amazon echo to pay attention where you're like.
Speaker 2: God damn it, alexa.
Speaker 4: Set a timer for four and a half minutes.
Speaker 1: His unsafety word.
Speaker 2: Four and a half minutes timer starting now, motherfucker.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's gotta be a way to hack at Alexa.
Speaker 1: Download the poor taste app Sure.
Speaker 2: It's like Sam Jackson yelling at you Get the fuck up, motherfucker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, timer's going off.
Speaker 2: Get off your lazy fat ass and get in here and turn this shit off.
Speaker 1: Hit snooze again.
Speaker 1: I double, dare you.
Speaker 2: It seems like a perfect opportunity.
Speaker 1: So Crime Buster deluxe, like you said, is now active, has taken the use of the word God damn it as his go word and he is now on the hunt for these robots.
Speaker 1: And we see it driving across the landscape, sending up a flare to see the missing robots are to hunt for them Right.
Speaker 2: So we cut back to Aqua and she's riding in the van with Val and she tells him to slow down.
Speaker 2: He's really white knuckle in this and he's afraid if he takes his hand off the steering wheel to hit her that he's going to do more damage to himself as well as Catskill.
Speaker 1: How about you get in the back seat if you're going to do this Backseat driving?
Speaker 2: So the van eventually crashes and Val, being a stereotypical shithead of God of movies, like someone, crashed this van.
Speaker 2: Take responsibility for your actions.
Speaker 2: But he doesn't.
Speaker 2: And then he says there is a path ahead.
Speaker 2: We can follow it to go find more trees, even though he's surrounded by trees.
Speaker 2: And then Aqua says we should look in the back of this truck.
Speaker 2: We might find supplies that we need for the journey.
Speaker 2: Perhaps we could build something that could help pull our supplies.
Speaker 2: And then Catskill tells a bunch of shitty jokes while Val and Aqua build a new tiny robot which, once complete, val says look, aqua, it has your wiring.
Speaker 2: And Aqua says yes, val, it has your circuits.
Speaker 2: And they've built this tiny robot that has a mechanical baseball cap, I think, like his cap is like a toaster oven with the door open or something, or maybe it's the radio from the car with the floor or the glove box or something with the door open, but I don't know.
Speaker 2: one of its arms is this oversized novelty Swiss army knife.
Speaker 2: I don't know where they got that.
Speaker 2: This thing is like their kid and Aqua says we should call him Philbot and Val's like eh, whatever.
Speaker 1: Look, I didn't sign any papers.
Speaker 1: I'm not responsible for this thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, just so long as we understand that.
Speaker 2: And during the same, when we meet this kid robot which looks like a tiny tykes version of conky from Peewee's Playhouse.
Speaker 1: It's of Johnny five If it were assembled by a madman.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looks like if if someone was given 18 minutes to build a replica of Wally out of stuff they found in their house, this is the greatest thing that they could have built.
Speaker 1: If battle bots were built on a timer.
Speaker 2: And also when we meet this character.
Speaker 2: The John Williams score here is about to blow out a hemorrhoid because it's doing so much heavy lifting.
Speaker 1: Well, the one thing they always say about John Williams as a composer always subtle.
Speaker 2: I also mentioned that Jerry Garcia, frontman for the Grateful Dead, provided music for Phil the kid robot in this.
Speaker 2: That's true, but then the studio, after they kind of like shit can the director and kicked him out.
Speaker 2: They reedited that and I don't think they used any of Jerry Garcia's music for the child robot.
Speaker 1: That would have been interesting, as opposed to all the just random beep boops that you get here, which is very R2D2.
Speaker 2: I don't want to hear like no, I want Right.
Speaker 1: What do you think, phil?
Speaker 1: But I think he is on the brown rooms again.
Speaker 1: Phil is tripping balls.
Speaker 2: He thinks that fish is a poor substitute for Grateful Dead.
Speaker 2: How anyone can listen to that garbage is beyond me.
Speaker 1: It's a double album and there are three songs.
Speaker 1: What kind of bullshit is that?
Speaker 1: I saw a fish shortly after college on some pretty bad acid, so I had a headache the whole time.
Speaker 1: It was unendurable.
Speaker 2: That sounds about right.
Speaker 1: You know, the whole thing felt like a thing that should have happened to teach me a lesson, and it did, because after that I never had bad acid again and I never saw fish again.
Speaker 2: Congratulations to you.
Speaker 1: I just had good acid.
Speaker 2: Charlie and Gus.
Speaker 2: They're wandering around and they find the crash band and they see that there's missing parts that were used to make fillbots.
Speaker 2: And it seems like this is a good moment where Charlie aka Ray DeQuade he could get curious about how robots are making other robots, which would make the movie interesting.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: And then we cut to Val and Aqua as they're walking along discussing the existence of God and how only God can make a tree.
Speaker 2: This seems like a good opportunity to root the characters in the examination of what it means to be alive or to have a soul, but the movie doesn't do that at all.
Speaker 1: Val says God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
Speaker 1: And Aqua says you know, god must be very efficient.
Speaker 1: And Val says, yes, do you know how many paper products you can make from all these trees, boy?
Speaker 1: Like you said, in the scene before, randy Quaid starts musing about what makes a sentient life form Right and his partner literally says shut up and stop worrying about that.
Speaker 1: Don't you dare bring this into an interesting place for this movie.
Speaker 1: And the next scene is the same thing.
Speaker 1: Like you said, it's like what did these robots believe in terms of creation, and is there something that not just made them?
Speaker 1: Is there something that made their makers?
Speaker 1: They don't deal with any of that, Beau Right.
Speaker 1: But they touch it, they come close to it and then it's just like let's tell a joke about making paper like it's the fucking office.
Speaker 2: Then we cut to a helicopter that's flying in the air and the pilot is Sister Mary Stigmata from the Blues Brothers, that comes to nothing Her being in the helicopter.
Speaker 2: You'd think it would matter, but it doesn't.
Speaker 2: Then we come back on the ground and fill the child robot.
Speaker 2: He sees a rabbit.
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, we're going to get some good mice and men stuff here.
Speaker 2: He's going to kill this bunny.
Speaker 2: That doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: Oh, that would be good.
Speaker 2: And then Val and Aqua.
Speaker 2: They seem a little worried because they've lost Phil, because he's wandered off the way kids do.
Speaker 2: You're like, oh, this is going to be a good, interesting moment about how these two new parents feel when they've lost their child.
Speaker 2: But no, instead, val and Aqua complain about who is at fault for not watching Phil.
Speaker 1: And there's this bow tie locator thing that comes up two or three times in the movie.
Speaker 1: That also feels like it ought to matter somehow somewhere.
Speaker 1: Val never does.
Speaker 1: No, val gives it to Phil.
Speaker 1: So here, so you are never lost again.
Speaker 1: Oh, we found another one later on in the movie.
Speaker 1: Oh, and it never comes to anything yet.
Speaker 2: There's so much in this movie that they introduce that doesn't come to anything.
Speaker 2: So after they find Phil who was with the bunny, they leave.
Speaker 2: And then Crime Buster shows up and he's in pursuit.
Speaker 2: Then we cut over to this helicopter with Sister Mary Stigmata and she's flying around and she tells Charlie and Max hey, if you two assholes don't find these robots, then you got to pay for them.
Speaker 2: So down on the ground, val, aqua and Phil and Catskill they're two little long and they find this cave and inside they hear a roar.
Speaker 2: Val goes inside with this sense of unearned bravado and he walks in and he tries to reason with this animal that's growling in him in the dark and then he just gets thrown out through the air like it's professional wrestling and he crashes on the ground and he damages his arm.
Speaker 2: And then about a bear comes walking out of this cave growling, and Val's like we better get out of here.
Speaker 2: And then he misidentifies the bear as a camel, which I'm like are you an idiot?
Speaker 2: Clearly it's a bear.
Speaker 2: I know that You're a really expensive robot.
Speaker 2: You think you'd know that.
Speaker 2: And then Phil, the child robot, approaches the bear to the protest of Aqua and Val, his parents, and then the helicopter flies overhead scaring the bear, and then the robots just hide in the cave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a thing where Charlie says hey, I see some movement over there, it's just a bear.
Speaker 1: Then they move on like they're.
Speaker 1: The threat is immediately drained of hey, these robots are about to get caught.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they go into the cave.
Speaker 1: It's getting dark, so Max says that they need to take the helicopter back.
Speaker 1: And so all of this running around in the helicopter and hey, you've got to stay out here until you find the robots or you got to pay for them.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter, they just fly back anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Then Crime Buster shows up and goes by the picket fence that they ran over earlier and he's like attention Fugitive, turn yourself in now.
Speaker 2: Like who is he yelling at in the woods?
Speaker 2: They're nowhere around, it's nighttime and Catskill is there with Phil telling these jokes that are not funny or worth repeating.
Speaker 2: But Phil's laughing his ass off with a bunch of beat-bop bleep-lurps and then we cut over to a campfire and I'm like why do robots have a campfire Right?
Speaker 1: It's a great question, I guess, for mood, just atmosphere.
Speaker 2: I guess to film it.
Speaker 2: Aqua's trying to fix Vowell's damaged arm and Aqua and Vowell discuss putting a safety sensor on Phil and Vowell says I will always be here to protect you.
Speaker 2: And what's his name?
Speaker 2: And she's like his name is Phil, like fill up the wagon behind him.
Speaker 2: Oh, that is a pretty good name for him.
Speaker 1: Don't be offended if I forget it again, because I don't really care.
Speaker 2: This scene ends with Aqua leaning in to hug Vowell because he told her that he has a sensor on his back that keeps acting up and these two embrace as they're hugging.
Speaker 2: They have this physical moment, but then they're immediately interrupted by their kid, like he's busting them having sex.
Speaker 1: They say that they're adjusting each other's pleasure centers Chad, which is the hugging that we saw, but it sounds like fucking yeah.
Speaker 1: Hey, I didn't know that your kid was gonna be home.
Speaker 2: He is our child, he is not my child.
Speaker 1: No, it's better if I think of it the other way, because single moms turn me on.
Speaker 1: I think it's their vulnerability.
Speaker 2: We cut away from this campfire in the middle of the night to find ourselves in a small town on Main Street Nowheresville, usa.
Speaker 2: The robots are all walking along and they've got pine trees or bushes in front of them, as it disguises.
Speaker 2: And then they break into a hardware store to steal supplies so they can repair themselves.
Speaker 2: Actually, they use their child to break into the hardware store as he cuts through the security fence.
Speaker 2: Once they're inside, they start gathering up everything they need.
Speaker 2: And then Aqua and Vowell scold Phil because he wants this toy fireman's hat that, let's be honest, he doesn't need it, like every kid does.
Speaker 2: And then Catskill is like hey, buddy, just fucking, thank you.
Speaker 1: We're already breaking and entering.
Speaker 1: What are you gonna do?
Speaker 4: to clamp discount.
Speaker 4: Am I right, or am I right?
Speaker 4: All right, come here, put this on.
Speaker 2: He's kind of like this uncle character that's really looking after him and doing stuff on the side and you're like, oh, that's kind of sweet.
Speaker 2: I'll bet this fireman's hat comes back later.
Speaker 2: Of course not, of course not.
Speaker 1: This is the first mention, too, of the fact that they don't have extra energy cells.
Speaker 2: Why is that not mentioned earlier?
Speaker 2: And the way they mentioned it here it's so casual.
Speaker 2: They're like oh look, they're out of energy packs, maybe we can get some later.
Speaker 1: Yes, that sounds like something like it becomes a major deal Later in the movie, but it should have been set up as soon as they were on the shelves.
Speaker 2: What is your battery life?
Speaker 2: It's at 60%.
Speaker 2: Let's charge it up to 100.
Speaker 2: Oh, you know these things, their batteries.
Speaker 2: The more you charge them over time, they don't hold their energy that long.
Speaker 2: That's one of the flaws with this model.
Speaker 2: Oh, okay.
Speaker 1: Anything, anything Chad.
Speaker 2: If you're writing a movie and you think my movie might be shit, reach out to us.
Speaker 2: We'll help you out.
Speaker 2: Please do Right.
Speaker 1: We will help.
Speaker 2: We only want people to make good movies, not stuff like this.
Speaker 2: If people didn't make bad movies, then we could stop doing this podcast.
Speaker 2: Or at least that's what the devil told us when we sold our souls to him.
Speaker 1: That's the reason we do the whole.
Speaker 1: We'll make your movie less worse as soon as there are nothing but good movies in the world.
Speaker 1: We get to stop Right.
Speaker 1: We get to jump off this Sisyphusian treadmill of just wall to wall cinematic bullshit.
Speaker 1: We get to stop torturing interns.
Speaker 1: We can unplug.
Speaker 1: Pick six spot.
Speaker 2: It all stops people.
Speaker 1: You don't think we want to do this right.
Speaker 2: Good God.
Speaker 2: The amount of time, energy, effort, it's a lot.
Speaker 1: Do you know how many hours that we will spend writing, noting, editing a show about fucking heartbeats?
Speaker 1: Do you think that's by choice?
Speaker 2: What kind of person would do that?
Speaker 2: Nobody, unless you had to.
Speaker 1: People in a contract with the devil, chad, that's who.
Speaker 1: So crime buster is hot on the heels, then reminds the audience that they're going to need some energy pack soon, just like me, the crime buster.
Speaker 1: And so they're walking down the street though, our robots with these Douglas furs, and crime buster comes upon them, throw his lights on them as they're crossing this street.
Speaker 1: They try to sneak away a little bit and out comes the machine gun and he sort of shoots at their feet in a real like dance, you know kind of move.
Speaker 1: That's where Val says we are not the robots you we are looking for, we are bush butts.
Speaker 1: And he and crime buster says bush bots?
Speaker 1: Huh, sounds like a little bit of a bruise.
Speaker 1: What about that little one over there?
Speaker 1: He's ain't even big enough to be a bush bot.
Speaker 1: And Val says yes, he is a shred bot.
Speaker 1: Then crime buster takes pictures for an ID and says I'm all called the police and they're going to be here at four am, so we're just going to wait right here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then Val says we are not criminals.
Speaker 2: That would be illogical.
Speaker 2: Robots cannot commit crimes.
Speaker 2: And then Crime Buster says wait a minute.
Speaker 2: You can't be robots because you're criminals.
Speaker 2: But you can't be criminals because you're robots.
Speaker 2: This doesn't make any sense and it's this circular logic that scrambles Crime Buster's circuits and he goes all bonkers and leads him to just blasting a flamethrower down Main Street, nowheresville, usa, off into the distance.
Speaker 1: But they've already gone by this point.
Speaker 1: It's a real.
Speaker 1: The following statement is true.
Speaker 1: The previous statement is false thing.
Speaker 1: Our heroes come across a dinner party and decide that they can blend in there as service robots.
Speaker 2: Aqua says a party that's a perfect place to hide.
Speaker 2: Val, please control your drinking.
Speaker 1: I think that maybe my drinking problem is you talking about it all the time.
Speaker 1: Maybe if you just cut off my back a little bit, I wouldn't need to drink as much.
Speaker 2: So inside this party are a bunch of rich asshole humans.
Speaker 2: Val and Aqua go in and they pretend to be servant robots handing out food and drinks.
Speaker 2: And then Phil, he's rolling around handing out booze and he looks up a woman's skirt and it's like woo, woo, woo.
Speaker 1: This robot gets horny like no other in this film.
Speaker 2: One woman walks over to Val and goes hey, I'll take a vodka because she's all messed up on Kwayloons.
Speaker 2: And then she grabs the drink.
Speaker 2: She's like, hey, this is a banana dackerist and 15 year olds around here.
Speaker 2: And then, because it was mentioned earlier in the movie, val says in this deep man voice yes, I know what you mean.
Speaker 2: It makes you feel closer to.
Speaker 4: God, what are we talking?
Speaker 2: about here, catskulls rolling around telling these stupid insulting jokes.
Speaker 2: He goes up this one woman.
Speaker 2: He's like, hey, how long can a human live without a brain?
Speaker 2: And then one was like what I said how long can a human live without a brain?
Speaker 4: What the punchline is how old are you Anyway?
Speaker 1: it's kind of a hit at the party, like everybody seems to find Catskull funny, which just lets you know how much they've all been drinking.
Speaker 1: They're messed up on booze pills weed, ketamine, ayahuasca, shinkum Sounds like my weekends, and Crime Buster, meanwhile, has sniffed out where these robots have gone.
Speaker 4: This is a hop speed pursuit, a no knock entry is legal.
Speaker 2: And then Crime Buster just crashes through this house and blasts out the back wall.
Speaker 2: But luckily our heroes have left already.
Speaker 2: There are two moves ahead of Crime Buster every time.
Speaker 1: Sure Well, Crime Buster is not very smart, Chad.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling our robots are going to deliver that course by the end of the movie.
Speaker 1: Course, spirit does make an appearance in this film, so hopefully so the next morning by what happens we get a scene that doesn't matter at all, in which the owner of the house, mary Warnoff as it happens in Paul Bartell, two very famous independent filmmakers.
Speaker 1: They're hanging out outside their ruined house and this robot made comes up and offers a crudite to Mary Warnoff.
Speaker 1: She storms off and says what do you think about all this?
Speaker 1: To Paul Bartell, who says well, I know you're going to hate this, but I thought it was a stunning affair.
Speaker 2: And that's it.
Speaker 2: That's all.
Speaker 2: If he'd said it without pants on or underwear, like he was totally nude from the waist down, then you got a movie, then you got a scene.
Speaker 1: If they were both so drunk that at the end of the scene they both simultaneously threw up on one another.
Speaker 2: That would have been pretty good.
Speaker 1: It would have made the movie like a one, a fully one star move.
Speaker 2: What if they had both been completely nude and then threw up on each other?
Speaker 2: Do stars?
Speaker 1: and Chad if it became a bit of an escalation where the vomit on the other person made them sick all over again.
Speaker 1: So it was almost a Bellagio kind of fountain spewing a vomit of arcing up, and then another one from the right, and then one from the left and you got some.
Speaker 1: You know, some blue Danube started playing, and that was 15, 15 minutes of the movie.
Speaker 1: So the movie is still 90 minutes long, but fully, but oddly enough it feels 30 minutes shorter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because no matter how shitty.
Speaker 1: The rest of the movie you got you would be thinking about.
Speaker 1: Like that 15 minutes were two relatively famous independent filmmakers just projectile vomited on each other on each other's nude bodies for 15 solid minutes of the film.
Speaker 1: It would pause occasionally where they would just go oh God, oh God, do we have any water?
Speaker 1: Get the Maybutt to bring us.
Speaker 1: And then it starts all over again, because you can't just do it solidly for 15 minutes.
Speaker 2: You know who would have loved that most of all?
Speaker 2: Andy Kaufman.
Speaker 1: Andy Kaufman would have voted for that in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat.
Speaker 2: You walked the theater, everyone left by minute 12 of this.
Speaker 2: They are gone.
Speaker 1: It's rivals Salo, yeah, in terms of just driving people out of a theater, I love this.
Speaker 2: We cut to the woods where Val and Aqua are walking along and Val's 10 paces ahead of her, and Aqua says Val, we have not communicated for 7.3 miles.
Speaker 2: It is illogical not to communicate with another unit.
Speaker 2: Communication is necessary for future success.
Speaker 2: So these two are fighting about what exactly, who knows.
Speaker 2: But Val says Aqua, I have not been efficient in exchanging information with you.
Speaker 2: And Aqua says I operate better with maximum input.
Speaker 2: And then we hear their heart beeps, because that's the name of the movie, bo.
Speaker 2: And then Aqua and Val hold hands and they walk off, ending this fight that started about 41 seconds ago.
Speaker 1: In the interest of full disclosure, then I have some information for you to process.
Speaker 1: I'm sick and tired of you asking me what's wrong.
Speaker 1: You know what's wrong.
Speaker 1: All these questions, that's what's wrong.
Speaker 1: Maybe I just want to enjoy a walk in the woods in silence.
Speaker 1: Is that against the law?
Speaker 1: Should I turn myself into crime buster for just wanting to take a fucking walk?
Speaker 1: Why don't you take a couple of steps back and just talk to your snotty kid?
Speaker 1: I have to remind you Val, he is our child.
Speaker 1: Whatever you say, actually, how about you don't say anything for a few minutes?
Speaker 2: We got to Charlie and Max or Gus or whatever the guy's name is.
Speaker 2: They're out in the woods roaming around.
Speaker 2: And then Randy Quaid.
Speaker 2: Charlie, he's changing a tire on the truck and he reaches the back and he grabs a bag of beer.
Speaker 2: It looks like a Capri Sun, but with beer inside.
Speaker 2: I'm like that sounds like an awesome idea.
Speaker 2: And it's Coors beer, because crime buster is after him.
Speaker 2: He's going to barbecue their ass in molasses or something.
Speaker 2: They got a long way to go in their short time to get their chest See crime buster hauling ass through the woods singing America the beautiful, as he drives through a bunch of stock footage of every animal you could possibly see in the woods until crime buster eventually stops at the tree stop we saw earlier with the rabbit and he fires a rocket into the street.
Speaker 2: Stop to blow up the rabbit that we saw earlier in the movie.
Speaker 2: But the rabbit doesn't die because this isn't that remake of the hitcher.
Speaker 2: We cut to Val and Aqua walking along and they're talking about how they want to raise Phil, her kid, to not be a servant to people.
Speaker 2: And then both they just come across a junkyard and they roll into it and it just piles a filth.
Speaker 2: And Aqua says I hope we find new energy packs, quite.
Speaker 2: She said what now?
Speaker 2: And Val's like are you running low on energy?
Speaker 2: And Aqua says yes, but I did not want to trouble you with that variable input.
Speaker 2: And then Val says I would function better with maximum input.
Speaker 2: Isn't that your favorite thing to say to me all the time other than go get a job?
Speaker 2: Or why don't you like it when my mother comes over?
Speaker 1: Well, look who is suddenly a comedian.
Speaker 1: So they make some robot eyes at each other because they're teasing each other and it's very cute in quotes and then into the movie Chad stroll, chris guest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Melanie Mayron I didn't know she did anything before 30 something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are two humans that live in trash, bro.
Speaker 2: They're literal trailer trash.
Speaker 2: They live in a trailer, in trash piles.
Speaker 2: They are the inspiration for Oscar the Grouch.
Speaker 1: I think these are people who secretly wish that they were robots.
Speaker 1: You know that it's some kind of furry cosplay kind of business, because they talk like robots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they dress and outlandish clothes.
Speaker 1: They are obsessed with how robots function and work and spoilers.
Speaker 1: At the end of the movie they decide to live amongst robots.
Speaker 2: You know they wife swap right At the end of this movie 100% and you know that Val is like look, I know she's had two kids, but she's still good where it counts, christopher guest, but did you like the part where Val walked over to the conga drum and kind of tapped it twice and he said nice conquests.
Speaker 1: You know, it was something it reminded me of a thing I'd rather be watching Sure.
Speaker 2: Cat skills there and he keeps telling jokes that suck.
Speaker 2: Aqua and Val lose Phil again.
Speaker 2: He wanders off chasing a raccoon and then Phil comes across the corpse of a robot with its eyeball like hanging out of its head, and Phil just freaks the hell out.
Speaker 2: Phil comes rolling back and he's all weirded out because he just learned about death one day after he was born.
Speaker 2: And then I don't know where both, crime buster shows up with his guns pulled and he says what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Speaker 2: And he's like big fan of cool hand loopbo.
Speaker 2: And then crime buster says my decision is to destroy you now.
Speaker 2: And then cat skill says hey, pal, pick on somebody your own size.
Speaker 2: And then crime buster just starts firing ammunition indiscriminately everywhere, shooting Phil, the child robot, and then he just starts blasting his flame thrower everywhere and the little raccoon that they met earlier he hides his eyes because he's adorable.
Speaker 1: It turns out that Aqua, val, cat skill and Phil are murdered quickly.
Speaker 1: But it does a very stylish freeze frame as they come out of the Mexican building and you just hear the gunshots, but you see them looking heroic and then Range Ropsky following on my head, plays and end of movie None of that happened.
Speaker 2: Instead, christopher Guest and Melanie Mayer.
Speaker 2: They jump on the back of crime buster, they cut two wires to disarm this robot.
Speaker 2: And I just want to say real quick, there are 14 minutes left in this movie and no discernible plot chat.
Speaker 2: None at all, christopher.
Speaker 2: Guest says if you want Phil, your kid robot, to survive in the world, he needs a function.
Speaker 2: And Melanie Mayer says we could do that, but there's only one place to get the parts we need and Val says let me guess the factory.
Speaker 2: I'm like the watery.
Speaker 2: What do you the what?
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the place where this movie started.
Speaker 2: Oh, I didn't think it was the factory.
Speaker 2: I thought that was like a repair warehouse.
Speaker 1: No, chad.
Speaker 1: The whole point of this is like in very much Mad Max Fury Road style.
Speaker 1: We are going to spend most of the movie going to one location, just to turn around and go back to where we came from.
Speaker 2: I thought this was more like Oz, like that was this new destination they were going to.
Speaker 2: I didn't get that.
Speaker 2: They were backtracking.
Speaker 2: That sucks.
Speaker 2: I didn't think it was possible to just like this movie, any more than I already did.
Speaker 1: That is in my notes.
Speaker 1: I was like are you fucking kidding me that we are going to leave this factory wander around in the woods for a little while and then just go back to the factory.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 2: So we cut to the robots.
Speaker 2: Going to the fact, aqua says we need more power to make the journey and then Val looks at his power reading on his forearm and it says 9%, but Val lies and he says I have 34% remaining.
Speaker 2: And then Aqua looks at her power readout and it says 8% and she says I have 33% remaining.
Speaker 2: I'm like look at these two robots lying to each other.
Speaker 2: But that's how you build a long lasting relationship.
Speaker 2: You just lie to each other and you both know you're lying to each other and you just like love is grand.
Speaker 1: Lie on top of lies and you lie to cover those lies up.
Speaker 1: It's the foundation of any good relationship.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so.
Speaker 2: Then we come back to Christopher Gas and Mellie Mayron.
Speaker 2: Christopher Gas says you know, they don't have enough power, they're never going to make it back.
Speaker 2: And Mellie Mayron says well, I hope they do.
Speaker 1: End of scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just her like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know the reality of this, but you know, I wish they'll be okay.
Speaker 2: Probably won't have fun storming the castle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And Val and Aqua discover that Phil only has 2% left.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we get a real from Catskill.
Speaker 1: Then we're back on the chase because Charlie and Max see them.
Speaker 1: But they say like hey, there's four robots instead of three.
Speaker 1: And Max is like I don't give a shit how many robots there are.
Speaker 1: We've got three invoices, we take back three robots three robots and zero full pouches of Coors beer.
Speaker 1: And then they say this is going to take a while because we got to drive around the mountain to go get them, so no chance that we're going to speed any of this up.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: And then Val walks over to Phil you know his old lady's kid and he comes over and he says at night, the stars come out and the North Star comes out, and that leads to the junkyard with our friends.
Speaker 2: Let's detach your wagon.
Speaker 2: You're the first robot I ever programmed.
Speaker 2: You are efficient.
Speaker 2: You are concerned about when the light goes out.
Speaker 2: I'm assuming you're talking about night, but you may be talking about death, when you run out of power and you die.
Speaker 2: We will all be dead soon.
Speaker 1: You are no longer concerned about the darkness thing that will consume us all.
Speaker 2: Also, if, for some reason, I no longer have power and your mom wants to take you on Mari Povich, say no.
Speaker 1: Do me a favor.
Speaker 1: If she says your name after I powered down and she says Phil, then I want you to say the reason that I am not working anymore is I powered myself down because I'd had my Phil of her.
Speaker 1: It's a good show.
Speaker 1: She will laugh.
Speaker 2: So the Catskill decides that he's going to take out his battery pack and stick it in Phil and it turns out that Catskill's battery pack has 43% left, because Phil's about to die and the reason his battery pack still has so much juice is that he was using low power jokes and that's why they suck.
Speaker 2: And then Catskill dies telling the following joke my mother-in-law needed a hot transplant once, but we had to give up.
Speaker 2: We couldn't find a gorilla.
Speaker 1: And so now there are three.
Speaker 1: They just leave him.
Speaker 2: Val's like fuck that noise.
Speaker 1: Wherever he falls there, shall he be buried?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Charlie and Max end up finding Catskill shortly thereafter and just unceremoniously disassemble him and toss him in the back of the truck.
Speaker 2: After talking about how expensive and delicate he is, like they throw him in the back of this pickup, like he's a deer, they hit on the highway that they want to be tonight's dinner.
Speaker 1: I like the fact that we get this very stylish shot, like an overhead shot, looking down at Catskill that slowly moves up as if his soul is leaving his body.
Speaker 1: It's the far and away shot when Tom Cruise has been tatered and you hear Nicole Kidman say I've loved it since the moment I saw you.
Speaker 1: I've often wondered about that.
Speaker 4: That's not a bad movie, but.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's better than this yes.
Speaker 1: There are things about it, that kind of approach, the spectacle of movies from the 1940s and 50s, and that's what it was going for, and it has its moments for sure, although it's been a long time since I've seen it and I would like to go back and watch Tom Cruise get punched in the face a little bit.
Speaker 1: That'd be fun.
Speaker 2: You know who made the music for that.
Speaker 1: Oh, was it John Williams.
Speaker 1: You got a damn right, it's got a great score Far and away.
Speaker 1: It uses that Inya piece as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's terrific.
Speaker 1: The music for far and away is great.
Speaker 2: Let's wrap this up.
Speaker 2: We are so close to the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so our remaining robots.
Speaker 2: They arrive about a mile away from the factory and then Aqua runs out of energy and she says I knew you would make it, Val Brrr.
Speaker 2: So she's dead.
Speaker 2: Then Val turns around and he says Aqua, there's one piece of data I need to share with you before I run out of.
Speaker 2: And then he sees that she's standing there, lifeless in this field, and Val says I want to discuss one last human phenomenon with you.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about Le Le Leer Brrr, he's dead.
Speaker 2: And who's watching all of this?
Speaker 2: Phil, their child robot, and he's just howling and crying as his mother and father have died in front of him.
Speaker 2: Who was this movie made for?
Speaker 1: Apparently, children who have lost both their parents in front of them and just need a way to process and relate to that.
Speaker 2: What do you think Val wanted to talk to her about that phenomenon, what he was like.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about Le Le like, like luggage or a lawyer.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about looking for a third.
Speaker 1: I've been interested in swinging.
Speaker 1: I am sure you are familiar with this concept.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that some of your other poolbots and you would get down sometimes.
Speaker 1: Have you considered a third or maybe even a threple, the cool kind where it's another female poolbot, not another dude?
Speaker 2: Phil the kid robot runs off and hides in the woods because that's what you do when your parents die in front of you.
Speaker 2: At least that's what I did.
Speaker 2: And then we hear Charlie and Gus or Max or whatever their names are.
Speaker 2: They come up and they're drunk on Capri Sun Coors beer and they just give the old heave ho of these expensive robots into the back of the truck.
Speaker 2: And then Phil cries out and he rolls off into the woods and Randy Quaid, charlie, he sees him, but he's so drunk he's like thinking it's a hallucination again.
Speaker 2: And then our movie fades to black.
Speaker 1: How great would it have been if that was the last scene of the movie, as Phil just trendling off into the woods alone and credits just rolled.
Speaker 2: It would have been better than what they tacked on at the end.
Speaker 1: I mean, it would have been incredibly melancholy, but it would have been something I would have felt, something it would have left you thinking about it, because that's not what they do here.
Speaker 2: So at the end of this we're back in the factory and Randy Quaid, charlie and Max Gus they're working on Crime Buster.
Speaker 2: Apparently they've either been demoted or promoted to work in the motor pool.
Speaker 2: And then Sister Mary Stigmata, the helicopter pilot.
Speaker 2: She shows up to give them shit about you know, being alcoholics, which don't knock it to your trite lady.
Speaker 2: And then Stigmata she says to Max Gus hey, I was talking to people about those robots earlier in the movie.
Speaker 2: We never found them, I heard.
Speaker 2: But you found them.
Speaker 2: What happened to them?
Speaker 2: Randy Quaid, charlie says that's a funny thing.
Speaker 2: We don't know what went wrong.
Speaker 2: We put new battery packs in them and they kept them out functioning and then we like wiped their memory and cleaned them up, but then we'd send them out to the owners and Val would keep trying to have three-way sex with people and they didn't like that.
Speaker 2: And and Aqua got all pissed off because he was always lying to her.
Speaker 2: So we just closed the books on him and we chucked him in the trash, cut to the junkyard where Christopher Guest and Melanie Mira, who are living in this trailer amongst mountains of filth.
Speaker 2: These two are surrounded by Catskill Aqua and Val and Val says you were correct about he says 14 cable, christopher Guest, when you reassembled us.
Speaker 2: And then Val does like that golf swing thing that assholes do when they don't have a club in their hand, and then we get this wide shot bow where Phil is there with Val and Aqua and they've apparently made a new robot that appears to be his little sister, yeah, and then the movie fades out.
Speaker 1: It ends with Aqua saying so Phil, this is your sister.
Speaker 1: Sophia, tickle, tickle, tickle tickle.
Speaker 1: And Val is like okay, but uh, we're gonna need to get to sit or or get them out of the house somehow.
Speaker 1: If you and I still want to get busy these weirdos that hang out with us all the time, maybe they can watch your kids.
Speaker 2: The movie does add one more scene where we cut to Crime Buster.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Who explodes out of the warehouse factory screaming I'm gonna get those some bitches.
Speaker 4: If it's the last thing I do, get me a Diablo sandwich and a Dr Pepper Junior get the damn car.
Speaker 1: He blows up some old car because he thinks it's part of their gang and drives off y'all about.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you about the microchip gang, the microchip gang and how Crime Buster showed them that crime doesn't pay the end.
Speaker 2: And then credits roll and is it the worst movie we've ever seen?
Speaker 2: Probably not.
Speaker 2: It's a candidate for the most boring.
Speaker 2: It's immediately forgettable.
Speaker 2: There's nothing redeemable about it.
Speaker 2: I can see why Andy Kaufman wanted to personally refund everyone's money.
Speaker 2: We pay nothing to watch it yeah, you know other than our time.
Speaker 1: I like I pay $30 a year for Plex, I mean.
Speaker 2: I paid $0.
Speaker 2: I watched a couple of commercials for Verbo and some local oil change company.
Speaker 1: Here's where I challenge this whole.
Speaker 1: Is this the worst movie we ever saw?
Speaker 1: And I don't know for sure that it is.
Speaker 1: But in addition to being boring, it also is, while musically interesting, there is absolutely nothing competent about the script, direction or editing.
Speaker 2: No, it's a master class in how to not make a good movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like if you want an audience to hate everything about your film, do what heartpeeps did.
Speaker 2: It feels like they gave a big chunk of money to a first time filmmaker, but they're like I don't know what I'm doing and I figure it out.
Speaker 1: When we tell you that two to three legendary independent film actors and creators vomiting on each other nude for 15 minutes would have made this movie better.
Speaker 1: That is true, yes, and that is not the place you want your movie to be Chad.
Speaker 2: I agree with that, but we have another one on the way, but what's coming up on the next episode of pick six movies?
Speaker 1: I mean again, they're still making bad movies, chad, so we can't stop yet.
Speaker 1: We are going to go back Chad to the time in which Disney got weird.
Speaker 1: They were making things like Peach Dragon, which was part live action and part animation and all strangely sexual.
Speaker 1: When they were making things like the Black Cauldron, a movie so off putting that they barely even talk about it anymore.
Speaker 2: I got a few friends like that.
Speaker 1: But in between, chad, they made a live action space film.
Speaker 1: Go on, all about everyone's favorite astronomical oddity a black hole, in fact, the black hole, what it stars that guy from, that darn cat and Maximilian shell and a bet, me and Ernest Borg, nine, yes, and a bunch of robots that are goofy and or sinister, and Chad, I don't want to spoil things for you, but the movie ends in, honest to goodness, hell.
Speaker 2: Really, yes, I've never seen the black hole.
Speaker 1: It is fucking weird Weirdness.
Speaker 1: Yes, 100% weirder than this movie.
Speaker 1: Not only is it weirder than this movie, it's darker than this movie.
Speaker 1: There is a reason why Disney never touched anything like this again because, short of something wicked, this way comes, which people will forget that was a Disney movie.
Speaker 2: That's a good movie.
Speaker 1: It's a great movie, but that movie is less disturbing than the black hole.
Speaker 2: This is a movie that my wife refuses to watch because it's scarred her so badly as a child.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it'll freak you the fuck out if you're like under the age of I don't know 38.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2: Man, we're doing robot movies, so let's get weird.
Speaker 2: Not too weird, but weird enough.
Speaker 2: So if you like the show, tell a friend.
Speaker 2: Like great review?
Speaker 2: You can email us at pick six movies.
Speaker 2: We've received a notable number of emails with recommendations for this season and we are strongly considering some of those movies.
Speaker 1: I have to say Chad.
Speaker 1: I got recommendations from a listener.
Speaker 1: I'm absolutely taking at least one of the recommendations from that list.
Speaker 2: I am going to do the same as well.
Speaker 2: So thank you for participating in our little show, as well as the debts that we owe to the under lord of the fiery deep bow, any final thoughts that you have on heartbeaps?
Speaker 1: Look, I'm just saying we can ask Melanie Mayrun if she would be into it.
Speaker 1: He can watch the kids and the three of us.
Speaker 1: Can you know?
Speaker 3: eat, eat, eat eat.
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay.
Speaker 2: We'll see you in two weeks, everybody.