Chopping Mall is an 80s sci-fi/horror movie starring Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Barbara Crampton, Russell Todd, John Terlesky, Karrie Emerson, Suzee Slater, Nick Segal, and Dick Miller.
"A more classic plot, there isn't!" as the great Harold Zoid might say. A group of horny teens break into a mall (well, less "break in" and more "hide out until everything closes") in order to have an all-night party in the furniture store owed by the uncle of one of said teens, Ferdy (O'Dell). So it's Ferdy and his bro-tastic buddy Mike (Terlesky), slightly less annoying Greg (Segal), their respective girls, ditzy Leslie (Slater) and slightly less ditzy Suzie (Crampton), couple who married early to open a mechanic shop Linda (Emerson) and Rick (Todd), and odd girl out Allison (Maroney), who just screams "final girl" except that she's blonde.
So they all hang out and have sex in proximity to each other, like couples do, except Ferdy and Allison who have been set up as a blind date and get along famously just chilling and watching old movies. Sounds like a good time...
...EXCEPT FOR THE KILLBOTS! Yeah, this mall has recently brought three security robots online, one for each of the three floors that have important stores on them, I guess (the mall actually has seven floors). All they're supposed to do is patrol the halls and taser or sleep-dart anyone that doesn't have a badge. But then lightning strikes the building and turns them into killbots! (Killbots was actually the original title of the film, and it was released under that title in some places.)
So the robots kill several supporting characters, including poor unfortunate Dick Miller who never seems to get out of these situations alive, and then start killing off the teens in horrifically memorable ways. The most memorable is obvious Leslie's head exploding from the lasers that the robots can suddenly throw around, but they also throw Greg to his death and snap Mike's neck (or cut his throat, it's not entirely clear). Eventually everyone's dead except Ferdy and Allison, and then Ferdy seemingly dies after taking a blow to the head that bleeds (which is usually a pretty good sign that you're dead in movies like these), leaving Allison to destroy the last robot by luring it into a paint store and blowing it up with paint thinner! "HAVE A NICE DAY!"
I said not long ago that I was rediscovering my love of schlocky 80s movies, and holy shit, what I should have said was the Roger Corman is a goddamn genius (he and his wife co-produced, and while he's not mentioned in the official credits the cast and crew talks about him a lot on the blu-ray interviews, so I have to assume he was directly involved). There is not a dour moment in the movie, even with lots of people dying, but there are still "valleys", as the director says, where the characters can catch their breath a little. The robots do not make any goddamn sense but they never try to make them make sense - why do the robots have tasers powerful enough to electrocute people? Why do they have lasers at all, let alone lasers powerful enough to explode a human head? (Just once, though.) Why do they have plastic explosive squirters?
As long as we're asking stupid questions, Ferdy, at one point, asks out loud "what if the robots can read our minds?" If that's meant to be him cracking up, then it's a good line, but it never goes anywhere and he's not any more hysterical than anyone else, so I have to assume it's just a dumb line. And yet, that's the kind of movie this is, the kind that you wind up saying "what?" to the screen a lot.
Disclaimer: There is no chopping that happens at any point.
My Grade: C (it is not a good movie)
Rewatch Value: High (it is an amazing movie)
Next up: Conan the Barbarian
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