Chopping Mall

(1986) ***

Chopping Mall has everything you would expect and want in a campy 80's horror movie. It excels in no particular category. The performances and effects are all pretty well middle-of-the-road for the era. There's a head-detonation shot on par with the one from Scanners. There's a handful of 30 second cameos by people you recognize from other more famous 80's flicks (Mary Woronov, Dick Miller, Gerrit Graham). There's one superb quintessential tit shot. It's altogether not an unpleasant way to use up an hour and a half of what you have left of your existence. Much the same could be said of this review you're reading, if you were to spend an hour and a half reading it. Go ahead. Let that time just melt away into the past.

Eight horny teenagers are hunted down by a trio of robots commissioned to handle nighttime security at an LA shopping mall (actually, it's the Beverly Center, which looks exactly the same today.)

That electrical storm is still zapping away above it too. Well known LA "insider" fact.
There isn't really a whole lot else to say about Chopping Mall that I didn't cover in the first paragraph. So for those of you who want to make that hour and a half you spend reading this (slowly letting the sand trickle from the top of Father Time's hourglass to the bottom) go by a little quicker, let me point out some smaller details that caught my attention.

There's this guy, who for the purposes of this review, we'll call Beef Buttstacks. Beef is exactly the mid-80's jock douche you think he is just by looking at him. He chews on that same piece of gum throughout every one of his scenes. Loudly. With his mouth open. It's a little disturbing later when he gets up from the bed on which he's just gone down on his girlfriend and he's still chewing the gum. You may now spend the next 1 minute of your 1.5 hours shuddering. Go.

On a side note, that's Beef's girlfriend in the top photo. We'll call her Tits Fabulous because she's the one in the quintessential boob shot. She's also the one who gets her head blown up, making her the emotional lightning rod of this entire film. Oh wait. Spoiler above. Sorry.

Also, if I'm to believe Chopping Mall, sporting goods stores in the 80's used to stock their heavy firearms at the front of the store near the entrance - conveniently, right across from all the ammunition. I wish we still did this. It would make gun shopping so much less of a pain in the ass than it's grown to be. Fucking Democrats ruin everything.

The last thing I wanted to point out is that you should be careful in paint stores. According to Chopping Mall, if you have a few open cans of paint, a few open cans of thinner, and one flare, you can do this to a paint store.

No, I mean it. You can do it. Go.