Chopping Mall (1986)

 

Park Plaza Mall has just installed a state-of-the-art security system, including shutters across all exits and three high-tech robots programmed to disable and apprehend thieves using tasers and tranquilizer guns.  A suave salesman gives the mall's business-owning tenants a demonstration of the high-tech sentinels, smilingly assuring them "Nothing can go wrong!"

Everything, of course, is going to go wrong.

And it happens to all go wrong on a night when eight 'teenage' mall employees (the actors are all clearly well into their twenties) are having an illicit after-hours party in the complex's furniture store.  When a lightning storm fries the logic circuits and safety inhibitors of the security system's computer, the would-be partiers find themselves locked inside the mall with three implacable and very, very lethal robot menaces.

Chopping Mall was produced by Julie Corman, the wife of legendary schlockmeister Roger Corman, after she landed a deal to produce a horror film set in a mall.  Mrs Corman seems to have learned a few tricks from her husband: she apparently picked Jim Wynorski to write the film on the basis that he agreed to do it for cheap if she also let him direct.

Wynorski and his cowriter Steve Mitchell packed the film with quirky little references to earlier Corman productions, including squeezing in bit roles for long term Corman collaborators Dick Miller and Mary Woronov.  As a fan of several of their earlier films, such as Little Shop of Horrors and Death Race 2000, it was fun for me to see them both turn up here, even if I didn't particularly like Ms Woronov's scene.  Her character is one of the store owners, and during the salesman's presentation they mock the killer robots for looking like "The Three Stooges" (among making other, more offensive comments).  This was a poor choice, I think.  Don't undermine your monster, movie-makers!

Once the robots go berserk, of course, no-one is mocking them.  They're running and screaming and in many cases, dying.  There's not really any narrative surprises here.  Chopping Mall is at its heart a straightforward slasher movie in the best Friday the 13th style.  The killer(s) here may be robots, instead of a psychotic human with severe hang-ups about teenage sexuality, but they're still unstoppable, implacable murderers and the script still targets the cast in descending order of their promiscuity.

Said targets are not the hapless, clueless victims we most often see in slasher films, though.  They become aware of the threat much earlier than is usual in such films and are largely proactive and cooperative about trying to find a way to survive. Their strategies were not always the smartest - and wow, they were lucky they were in a mall that was so well stocked with weaponry! - but at least they had agency in the film and showed real efforts to defeat the robots. 

Chopping Mall was a surprisingly fun bit of nonsense.  If you are a slasher fan, check it out!