You know the film. It’s a film you have never heard of. The cast might be composed of actors you know and love or complete unknowns. You stumble across it on streaming and wonder if it will be worth two hours of you time. This series will be devoted to reviewing films like these, the strange items that pop up when you are looking for a flick on the streaming service of your choice. This is “We Found It On Streaming”
FILM: Chopping Mall
Release Date: March, 1986
Run Time: 77 Minutes.
Streaming Service(s): Amazon Prime Video, Peacock
Rating: R
This week is a bit of a cheat. I typically like to feature little known or obscure films in this feature, many exclusive to streaming, figuring if it is new to me, it might be new to you as well. However, this week I am featuring a film I have heard of before, had a rather sizable theatrical release and if you are a fan of horror films, you probably heard of it too. It has a cult cache in the genre.
For those of you who were born after 1989, let me geezersplain to you for a bit. Gather around grandpa and his rocking chair and let me tell you about the good old days. See, back in the 1980s, a new technology called the VHS tape was sweeping the nation. It was a new and exciting technology that allowed normal people to view theatrical released films in the comfort of their own homes. However, the technology was too expensive for the average person to buy VHS tape. Therefore, video rental stores sprung up around the country, renting out these tapes to us for a fee.
These stores became incredibly popular. It became a weekend ritual for people to go to the video store and find movies to rent for the weekend. This caused a spike in demand in films, especially for horror, and as such it opened the flood gates for different kinds of horror films to be made. No concept was too high, no killer was too weird. We had horror films featuring demonically possessed dolls, Frankenstein hookers, and killer Santa Clauses, to name a few.
This brings us to Chopping Mall, where the killers are kill-crazy robot security guards. Really.
Park Plaza Mall is installing a new high-tech security system–three automated robots who will patrol the mall after hours, subduing any criminal through non-lethal methods. However, when a stray lightning bolt strikes the robots’ computer command tower on the roof of the mall, the bots’ methods turn far more deadly. This is unfortunate for the group of young people who have planned a sex party in the mall’s furniture store they work at. The killbots see the harmless partiers as a threat and begin killing them in order from most annoying to least.
Chopping Mall is a cheesy movie. If you are a fan of “cinema” you will probably hate the film without even having to see it. But if you acknowledge its cheesiness and let it wash over you like you were a plate of nachos at a 7-Eleven, you will have a blast.
The film lets you in on the cheesiness early on. When the security robots are introduced to the mall store owners, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov reprise their characters from Eating Raoul, offering catty comments on the presentation. The film also features horror icons Dick Miller and Gerrit Graham in small roles. The winks at the genre doesn’t stop there. It continues on in the name of the stores. The sporting goods store where the heroes get their guns is called “Peckinpah’s,” certainly in honor of the renowned director of violent action films, Sam Peckinpah. One of the characters hides out in “Roger’s Little House of Pets,” surely an homage to Roger Corman, husband of the film’s producer Julie Corman and director of the original Little Shop of Horrors.
All of this shows that the film has a sense of humor about itself. Writer/Director Jim Wynorski and co-writer Steve Mitchell let you know that they know how cheesy their film is and invite you to have fun anyway. That allows you to turn off your mind off for 77 minutes and let the jump scares do their jobs.
But what if you accidentally leave you mind on? Listen, the film isn’t Shakespeare. The most admirable thing about it, other than getting the most bang out of its limited budgetary buck, is the economy of storytelling. It is a paltry 77 minutes long! With today’s run times rarely coming under 2 hours, that doesn’t seem enough time to actually have a complete movie. But that is enough time to have all the eight (yes, eight) potential victims introduced, give them a modicum of characterization so we can care about them, introduce the overall concept and then to have the victims picked off one by one. We get the bare minimum of characterization about the characters, but it’s enough so that we care whether they live or die, and so they become more than just chalk marks on a tally board.
Image via Concorde PicturesMy one pet peeve about the film is the robots. There is a lot of good about them–their design, the way they move, etc. But there is a lot of them doing whatever the plot needs of them at the time. Why did this bother me so? Because the film opens with that presentation where they spell out exactly what the robots can do. The specifically say that they have lasers designed specifically for cutting. The film then goes on to treat the lasers as if the robots just walked off the set of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Then there’s their ability to spray explosive putty on a door hinge of a door the kids are hiding behind. Why do the security bots need this feature? How did they get it past the city safety board? And don’t get me started on their ability to climb escalators.
The acting is on the level you would expect for a film of this sort. Most of the cast are incredibly beautiful people who can say their lines adequately before they are killed, which is all a film like Chopping Mall needs. The exception is Kelli Maroney, who was well on her way to becoming “scream queen” after this film, Slayground, and playing the Uzi-wielding cheerleader in the zombie classic Night of the Comet. She plays the sweet and virtuous pizza place employee brought to the party by her friends. Yep, you guessed it. She turns out to be the final girl, and a damn fine one at that.
There has been talk about remaking the film. In 2011, Roger Corman protege Robert Hall acquired the rights for the film, and intended to remake it. Only this time it will be an abandoned mall where teens will have to face off against mannequins possessed by ancient spirits. (Would it really be a remake then? That would be like remaking Sophie’s Choice but now it’s about her local ice cream shop adding a new flavor she has to choose from.) As of 2018, Hall was still talking about the project, but no progress has been made on it.
More promising, director James Wan stated his admiration for the film earlier this year, while saying it was the type of film that he’s like to put his spin on. Many took this as a sign that he wanted to direct the remake but that is all just speculation at this point. It seems inevitable that it will be remade someday. Until then, fans can watch the original on streaming.
Have you found a film on streaming that you’d like us to look at? Leave it in the comments and it might appear in a future installment of this feature.
