Naty's Spooky Corner

Chopping Mall

★★★★★

Sunday, October 3, 2021, 11:11 PM

I genuinely have no idea how I’ve managed to go this long without reviewing an 80’s horror porky, but here we finally are.

Chopping Mall is a 1986 Sci-fi “comedy” horror film that was written and directed by Jim Wynorski and produced by Julie Cormon. This films stars Kelli Maroney, Tony O’Dell, John Terlesky (and all his beautiful bone structure),  Russel Todd and Linda Stanton. The film is centered around the previously mentioned gang of teens that are trapped and slowly picked off by three murderous security robots in the dead of night.

Yup. That’s the entire plot of the movie. Just an easy, simple plot that still had me feeling anxiety for the characters several times throughout the film. To be fair, I did also want to give a shout-out to Jim and his colleague Steve Mitchell for having written the plot of this movie within a 24 hour time span. There was notably an insane amount of creativity and uniqueness that was tied to this film, quickly making it one of my 80’s horror faves.

Enter the passcode to proceed to the spoilers ahead.

As mentioned at the top of this page, this film is very much a “Porky”, which means that it has nudity, and more often that not, female nudity that does not add anything at all to the plot of the film. But hey, it was the 80’s and this type of film was all the rage. So if this does not sound like it’s your cup of tea, then you can honestly go ahead and fast forward through the first 25 min. Of the film and then join in once the action (and not not that kind of action you sicko) gets started.

This is going to sound like a surprising take-away, but as someone who was unable to enjoy malls when they were at their height in the 80’s this film was thoroughly surprising to take in. From the paint store that was conveniently located in the mall to the sports store that had what seemed to be an endless amount of guns and ammunition ready to sell to the masses, I found myself enjoying the more time capsule aspects of this film that were not meant to be showcased  in such a way, but that delightfully provided such an experience nonetheless. (Yes, yes I know, I’m such a zoomer, tell me something I don’t know)

What I really liked about this film is that it is one of the early sci-fi horror films that is centered around the survival of one lone female protagonist. And while yes, the first half of the film shows the gang trying to outwit the bots and barely survive, it’s not until the third act of the film that the quick wit of the lead character Allison is fully demonstrated when she lures a bot into the paint store for an explosive surprise. What further adds to the film is that she’s not your typical “too cool for you” survivalist like we see in the Aliens series with Ripley’s character - she’s just a typical nerdy high school kid who was able to face one of the Protectors by herself and live to tell the tale. Which is more than we can say for any of the other characters in the film…
But yes, credit should also be given where credit is due to Ferdy, Rick, and Linda for also having plenty of wits to them - a strength that is often lacking a bit too much for my taste in the horror genre.

Overall, I was surprised to find out that I enjoyed this film a whole lot more than I originally thought I was going to. Yes, it did have some face palming parts of the plot that involved a lightning storm causing the bots to become evil (which, come on. You really expect me to believe that the engineers didn’t think of a way to protect the equipment from something as common as lightning? Or that they didn’t program a failsafe if something were to go wrong in the programming for the bots to auto-deactivate? Anyways….) but overall, I found myself being unable to look away from the cat and mouse game that was taking place on the screen.

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