‘I guess I’m just not used to being chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots...’
The ’80s were a glorious time for weird little robots running around the place. Aside from the big guns like Robocop and The Terminator, you also had Short Circuit, Batteries Not Included, Cyborg, Deadly Friend and on and on. Chopping Mall, released to a collective shrug in 1986 but always destined to become a cult classic, is somewhere between Dawn of the Dead and Robocop, and while it is miles away from either in terms of quality, it’s still a lot of fun…
A bunch of teenagers with access to their local mall decide to host a party there after closing time. Unfortunately, the mall has just hired three killer robots to serve as security. When the kids (including horror legend Barbara Crampton) get locked in overnight, the film becomes a race to survive.
Clocking in at a glorious 76 minutes (Roger Corman, the film’s producer, knows what audiences want), Chopping Mall is a fast-paced thrill ride with loads of easter eggs for hardcore horror fans and plenty of inventive death sequences. Just when you think things are starting to become tedious, BOOM, there’s a death sequence. You think the action’s tailing off? Now there’s a bunch of actual tarantulas running around the place. Pure cinema.
Chopping Mall will be unwatchable for large swathes of the movie-going public, but for horror fans looking for something a little off the beaten path, this one is a beauty.
