Well before the release of Man On The Moon, Andy Kaufman was a legend in comedy circles, and few aspects of his brief but fruitful life have gone unexamined in the books, videos, and television specials that have cropped up in the past few years. Within them, you're more likely to find coverage of Kaufman's weakness for prostitutes than references to the comedian's sole feature-film performance in the misbegotten 1981 romantic comedy Heartbeeps. And with good reason: Much of Kaufman's reputation rests on his role as a fearless innovator and troublemaker, and there's not a shred of those attributes in Heartbeeps. Instead, the film finds Kaufman in Robin Williams-esque lovable-imp mode as a top-of-the-line companion robot in the not-so-distant, but cheap-looking, year of 1995. Kaufman falls in love with a robot played by Bernadette Peters, who wears what appears to be a giant, undifferentiated mass of copper wire on her head—and behaves, for no particular reason, like a cordial Southern madam. Countless miscalculations and errors in judgement make Heartbeeps one of the most thoroughly wrongheaded major-studio films ever made. Apparently the result of Universal guessing that since kids loved the robots in Star Wars, they'd love a film in which similar robots wander through the woods for 75 minutes bantering stiffly, it's stupefyingly uneventful even as kiddie science fiction goes. At one point, a borscht-belt comedian robot (voiced by Jack Carter) gives his energy to an insufferably cute, Jar Jar Binks-style baby robot (voiced by Jerry Garcia for some reason), but that's as close to a climax as Heartbeeps gets. Newly reissued by Universal, apparently to exploit its connection with two of this winter's biggest flops (Man On The Moon and Bicentennial Man), it's an overlooked, nearly forgotten film that deserves to stay that way.