Let’s Go to the Mall, Today!

Is there anything more quintessentially 1980s than the mall? Sure, shopping malls are still around to this day, but they’re these large, empty husks that are slowly dying off, mammoths that once dotted the landscape, with parasitic little humans wandering up and feeding from the teats of commerce that now stand largely abandoned by all but the most bored of consumers. Most of what you can get at a mall you can get faster, cheaper, and easier online, and the whole thrill of going to the mall to hang out and spend the day just because has long since faded. Malls aren’t what they used to be, and people rarely think of them as “destinations” anymore.

Sure, there are other trappings of the 1980s that people remember as well. The dayglo colors and neon lights. The awful, poofy fashions with the big shoulder pads. The music, the look, the feel, the sound. It all comes together in a very 1980s kind of way. But the mall, it exemplified it all in a way that it never could for the 1990s or any decade after. There was a very specific slice where the mall seemed like the go to because it was the cool place to be. The 1990s, with its slacker aesthetic, didn’t think of the mall as the cool place, just where you ended up because you had nothing better to do (see also: Mallrats). But the 1980s malls were where it was at.

That’s what makes a film like Chopping Mall work so well, or at least it did. If you were living in the 1980s, the malls had this comforting aura about them. They were the destination, the place you wanted to go to be part of it all. And then for that to turn into a place of horror felt like a violation in a form. Now, that’s not to say that Chopping Mall is a good film, because it’s not. It’s really goofy and silly and tries to swing much higher than its production values allow. But it does have a catchy hook, and a great name, and the feeling it evokes, turning the mall into a dangerous place, can’t be denied.

The film opens with the debut of the new state-of-the-art robotic security system at the Park Place Mall. These three robots, one per level of the mall, are meant to patrol and protect the mall at night. They find perpetrators and arrest them, safely and harmlessly. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Except on a fateful night, after the mall is closed, a lightning strike hits the mall’s roof, sending a short through the system, frying the robots. They shut down, come back up, and suddenly their orders are changed… even if the people operating them don’t realize it.

That same night of the lightning strike, a group of mall employees at a furniture store decide to have a party. The shindig is orchestrated by Rick Stanton (Russell Todd) and Nick Segal (Greg Williams), and they get their buddy Ferdy Meisel (Tony O'Dell) to agree to it. They invite over their ladies – Karrie Emerson as Linda Stanton, Barbara Crampton as Suzie Lynn, and Kelli Maroney as Allison Parks – along with some other friends, and have a good time in the store. However, things turn south once the robots realize there’s people in the mall. Despite their programming, these robots treat the employees as bad guys, and they’re out to put a stop to the party… and their lives.

The fun of Chopping Mall is in watching the robots roll around, causing trouble. The bots aren’t like the T-800; they’re very toy-like and silly looking, with a simple construction that lets them be kind of cute, almost like a Johnny-5 from Short Circuit. In fact, the basic setup for how these bots go bad is very similar to how Number 5 gets his personality. Not that one film influenced the other since both came out around the same time in 1986. It’s just interesting to note how the two films take similar ideas and run with them in very different directions.

As far as the story itself, though, it’s all pretty limited. The party-goers are a pretty worthless lot of characters, being bros and dames that could all be interchangeably shuffled around. The only two truly standout characters are Allison, the obvious final girl, and Ferdy, her nerdy suitor. The two are cute together, and have a nice meet-cute moment that clearly extends into something more. They’re the only ones to not drink and not have sex, which basically makes them immune to danger as per the rules of slasher flicks.

In fact, despite its weird, vaguely sci-fi premise, Chopping Mall is more slasher film than techno fantasy. The robots are there to facilitate a series of deaths, lacking any kind of personality. They are function in metal form, which certainly makes them formidable but not exactly interesting. They’re as interchangeable as the characters they’re stalking, and in fact the film basically moves all three around as it likes simply to increase danger from scene to scene. It’s hard to say they follow any kind of rules, they exist simply to kill.

Those kills, though, aren’t exactly great. The robots shoot a few people with lasers which… why do robots meant to pacify and arrest have lasers? We’re shown, more than once, that those lasers are deadly, which makes you wonder why the robots would need them in their ascribed set of duties. This doesn’t even get into the fact that when a store (or a mall) gets robbed, generally the merchants are told to just let the robber get away as the police can handle it and the store will have insurance pay for the lost items and/or money. Deadly bots don’t fit that corporate reasoning at all.

Not that we’re supposed to think too hard on this at all. It is a dumb film that was likely inspired simply by someone coming up with a cool title. “Shopping Mall? More like Chopping Mall, am I right?” And then they decided to make a slasher film from it. The killer is irrelevant. The bodies are irrelevant. The whole point is to take the concept and make an amusing slasher out of it and in that regard the film does work reasonably well. It’s certainly unique among slashers of the era just because of the angle it pursues, but I wouldn’t call it especially well made at any level. It gets by on creativity, and that’s about it.

Still, that name is great, and it’s likely what’s kept people coming back. Long after the actual shopping malls have all died and gone, plenty will still remember that title Chopping Mall and the silly pun that powered it. And that alone was enough to make this a relative hit back when malls actually mattered.