*batteries not included (1987)

  At long last, I bring you the continuation of The Christy Experiment!  (/pause for applause.)

This is one of those 80s films that slipped through my radar.  I don't remember ever hearing about it or seeing promos or trailers for it and I'm pretty good about those things.  It mostly holds up if you're willing to let go of the problematic portions stemming from it being an 80s movie.

Frank (Hume Cronyn) and Faye Riley (Jessica Tandy) have lived over the café that is their livelihood for decades and they are unwilling to sell even when an unscrupulous land developer (Michael Greene) hires a local thug named Carlos (Michael Carmine) to destroy the café.  Frank is down to his last shred of hope and looking to move himself and Faye into a nursing home in New Jersey when she discovers a pair of alien robots in the pigeon coop on the roof.  The robots make themselves useful in exchange for access to the electricity they need to power themselves by fixing whatever they can and soon it looks like the Rileys and the other tenants will be able to thumb their nose at the developer.  Of course he just brings in someone nastier to force the tenants out and a long-repressed tragedy comes back to the forefront.

The real tragedy here is Michael Carmine, an extremely gifted actor who graduated from some of the most prestigious acting schools in the country and was renown in the theater, was stuck playing broad stereotypes of Latinx in this movie and others before dying at the age of 30 from AIDS.  And Elizabeth Peña, who did go on to have a more varied career but still died relatively young, who is stuck playing an unwed pregnant Latinx stereotype.  Also, Frank McRae, the film's only African American actor, was reduced to only spouting lines from jingles in service to a storyline that saw his character a punch-drunk former boxer with an interest in mosaics.

So it's not the most representative movie out there but it was the 80s and we're going to let that go for now.  It's a cute film, very paint-by-numbers, but nothing offensive (except for the things I just mentioned).  It didn't blow my skirt up but if you come across it on Netflix while you're scrolling for stuff to watch with your kids, it's not bad.  There's one scene of robot sex (not kidding) that you may have to explain and a very gratuitous nude painting of pregnant Peña (missing the nipples, which may be more odd than anything else) but otherwise, it's fine.