Grindhouse Weekly: ‘Chopping Mall’ (1986)

It’s no secret that I love films of the 80s.  The birth of VHS paved the way for countless numbers of classic pieces of schlock, and the video boom helped the film industry become as large and prevalent as we know it today.  I would also argue that you’d be hard pressed to find a more representative catalogue of movies for a decade.  As soon as you see a movie made in the 80s, you might not know the film, but you will always know it was made in the 80s.  Though grindhouse cinema was mostly gone by this point, exploitation was alive and kicking, and one of the greats was Roger and Julie Corman’s Chopping Mall from 1986.

Chopping Mall is a fun little horror flick from director Jim Wynorski that involves a bunch of teens trapped in a mall with a bunch of killer robots.  For some reason, the mall owners hire a security company to employ extremely sophisticated robots to patrol the mall after hours and apprehend any would-be criminals.   One night, after eight friends decide to have a party in the store they work at, lightning strikes the control box for the robots, making them kill-crazy and out of control.

This movie has everything you could ever want in an 80s flick.  It’s got skateboarding, arcades, a synth score, sex, violence, rampant consumerism, and killer robots.  If you’re into movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but would have liked more head explosions, this film is for you.

Clocking in at a mere 77 minutes, this is a brisk movie that doesn’t break from the action often, however the kids are mostly idiots so they get dispatched fairly quickly as well.  The robots employ a nice arsenal of weapons to kill these hapless horny teens, ranging from tasers, to lasers, to simply ripping throats with their mandibles.  It was definitely an interesting choice for the manufacturers to fit the robots with deadly lasers and plastic explosives when their job is to simply patrol the mall, but apparently they wanted the kill-bots to be able to blast through walls.

Nearly everything about this film is completely ridiculous and illogical, but those aspects make it all the more fun to watch.  There’s also a locker room scene that involves two of the main characters chatting away while naked women are walking around in the background.  I wasn’t aware that malls were outfitted with naked girl locker rooms, but it was an interesting revelation nonetheless.

The cast is your average teen horror fare, with the jock, the nerdy guy, the slutty girl, and so on, but there was a nice cameo by Paul Partel and Mary Woronov, the couple from Eating Raul. The dialogue spoken in this movie was amazing with lines such as “Good times to the max,” being used in casual conversation.

For fans of 80s cinema, you won’t find a better representation of the decade than Chopping Mall.  It’s quick, it’s goofy, and it’s good times to the max.