Second Sight, out July 24

Steve Barron’s mid-80s comedy about the love triangle between a man, a woman and his PC will inevitably be best remembered for Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder’s phenomenally successful single title song Forever in Electric Dreams (it reached No. 3 in the UK charts, pop pickers!) and yet the movie itself is a sweet enough genre-tinged comedy, released on Blu-ray.

Lenny von Dohlen (Twin Peaks’ Harold Smith) is Miles Harding, an architect living in the same apartment block as cellist Virginia (Candyman) Madsen as Madeline Robistat. He’s a bit nerdy, secretly fancies her, and before you can shout “Cyrano de Bergerac” his PC is composing songs for her. You see, if you bought one of these monster computers back in the day, downloaded all the content from the mainframe (!) and threw champagne over the keyboard it would become sentient!

In the days of mullet hair and shoulder pads the thought of a computer being able to control the lighting in a house must have seemed like the most futuristic sci-fi, and yet today we can get Cortana to do this and so much more. Didn’t Arthur C Clarke once say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? As such, viewers in the ’80s must have seen Edgar the robot’s shenanigans as high witchcraft. But sadly the tech/fantasy aspects of the movie are just a plot device to drive the romance between Von Dolen’s dull lead and Madsen’s wide-eyed ingenue. When Maxwell Caulfield turns up you expect him to be the fly in the ointment, but no, he’s just a friend.

Far more interesting are the interviews with the stars, writer (the improbably named Rusty Lemorande) and director. We find out that the leads were treated like stars, that the director was learning everything as he went along and that all the non-San Francisco locations and interiors were shot in Twickenham.

Verdict: We’ll always be together, however far it seems! Part of the 1980s Weird Science/Mannequin run of rom-cons with a fantasy element, there’s not enough com and very little rom, and just ends being a sweet, harmless time-locked confection. 6/10

Nick Joy