My Shudder Pick of the Month is the All-Time 1986 Classic Chopping Mall
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I take great comfort in knowing that if I live to be one hundred years old, a certainty now that I’ve stopped drinking, I still won’t be able to see all the great movies and television shows, let alone watch all the great television shows, read all the great books, and listen to all the great albums.
There’s simply too much! Too much for any of us to be on top of everything. Shudder alone has so many riches, known and unknown, that I could binge on the popular horror streaming site for months, if not years, and still only experience a fraction of its wonders.
I’m not sure why it took me forty-eight years to watch the 1986 cult classic Chopping Mall. For starters, it’s called Chopping Mall. How great is that title? Even Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz couldn’t think of a better title for a satirical horror movie that takes place in a mall but involves no chopping.
Laser Shooting Killer Robots doesn’t have quite the same ring, but I am fond of its alternate title Killbots. Where Chopping Mall is misleading, albeit awesome, Killbots is awesome and appropriate since it is very much about killer robots, and “Killbots” is a clever portmanteau.
Chopping Mall has all the right influences: George Romero, John Carpenter, and Roger Corman at his most wickedly satirical. How can you not love a movie where Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, and Dick Miller reprise their most beloved roles?
The only downside is that the Roger Corman All-Stars don’t stick around. When Woronov and Bartel popped up in an early scene as the couple they played in Eating Raoul to act as a kibitzy Greek chorus, I found myself thinking about how much I like the prolific character actress/Warhol Superstar and writer-director-actor.
Every movie would benefit from the presence of Paul Bartel and Mary Worunov. Yet very few filmmakers have taken advantage of the opportunity to work with these legends.
Then, alas, they leave and never come back. They’re one-scene wonders, but the movie has other ways to delight us.
Speaking of short and sweet, Dick Miller plays a put-upon working-class schmuck named Walter Paisley, who works at the titular mall as a janitor on the outs with his coworkers.
Miller similarly only appears in a single scene, but that nevertheless afforded him the ultimate honor: being murdered onscreen by a Killbot. He was so excited about his role here that his tombstone reads, “Dick Miller, Beloved Husband, Father and Actor Who Was Murdered by a Killbot (in the movie Chopping Mall, not in real life. In real life, he died of natural causes at 90).
Miller appeared in so many classic movies, yet he chose one he’s only in for a few minutes for his headstone. That only seems odd if you haven’t seen Chopping Mall.
Chopping Mall opens with a fakeout. What appears to be a Protector Security Robot in action turns out to be the end of a promotional video touting these marvelously old-school robots as the future of mall security.
For extra protection/danger, the mall is locked up at night to ensure that nobody can get inside or outside.
Even when operating properly, these machines seem pretty damn lethal. When the representative of the company that makes these lethal robots assures the crowd and us that nothing can go wrong, he ensures that everything will go wrong.
The Killbots are marvels of craftsmanship and design. They look like something out of Lost in Space, but their design, voice, and behavior hearken back to an even earlier age of science fiction.
Co-writer/director Jim Wynorski is a traditionalist when it comes to robots. I appreciate that. I experience a Pavlovian shiver of delight when I see an old-timey robot in a movie or television show. It appeals to the child in me. That’s why I couldn’t hate Borderlands as much as I thought I would/should have. It has a nifty old-school sassy robot voiced by Jack Black that I found an utter delight. He didn’t save the film he definitely stole it.
The ironically named Protectors are supposed to protect the mall by detaining criminals and thieves with tasers and tranquilizer darts.
Then a bolt of lightning makes the computer controlling the machines go bonkers and they adopt a more lethal approach.
Instead of waiting for meat-bags to commit crimes, these robots instead adopt a “shoot first, then shoot second, never stop shooting” philosophy. With their speed and laser guns, the killer security robots prove a formidable foe.
Chopping Mall follows two pizza place employees, Suzie (Barbara Crampton), and Alison (Kelli Maroney), and their boyfriends, Ferdy (Tony O’Dell) and Greg (Nick Segal)
Being a screen queen presents unique acting challenges that Crampton is more than up to. Late in the film, for example, she’s trying to escape the mall through an air vent and breaks down as she becomes cognizant of just how much danger she’s in.
Her character is being pursued by evil, deceptively polite robots who talk in a classic hollow metallic drone, yet her fear, claustrophobia, and confusion are all real. She adds an element of verisimilitude to an utterly absurd situation.
The robots replace Isaac Assimov’s First Rule of Robotics—a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm—with the much harsher “Kill all humans.”
That might seem unfair, but have you actually met human beings? They are an extremely flawed and misguided species. I found myself rooting for the killer robots.
In an irresistible bit of satire that satire that never gets old, the security guards are unfailingly polite. Just because they’re massacring every non-robot they encounter doesn’t mean they have to add insult to injury by also being rude.
So after it dispatches with a human pest, it drones, “Thank you. Have a nice day” in a hypnotic monotone.
You might be saying to yourself, “Hey that sounds just like Robocop.” You would be right. The robots even say the words in the same way.
I’m sure Robocop was written before Chopping Mall’s release but it does bear a resemblance to the much more expensive and better known film that borders on legally actionable.
Chopping Mall becomes a survival horror action-comedy about some luckless but resourceful young people trying to outwit formidable opponents and surive One Night at the Mall.
Robocop isn’t the only classic film Chopping Mall resembles. The mall setting and satire of materialism run amok call to mind Dawn of the Dead while the electronic score and tight, claustrophobic setting recall Carpenter classics like Assault on Precinct 13.
Chopping Mall runs just seventy-six minutes and is available on Shudder and several other streaming sites. It’s less than eighty minutes of your time.
I’m going to give Chopping Mall the ultimate praise: it lives up to its title.
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