Chopping Mall

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

80s horror sleaze at it's...finest? Chopping Mall isn't a good movie by any means, but it's an interesting one. The actors in this film do their best with the merely passable script, and the budget of the film clearly went into the robots which aren't that interesting in the first place. Yet the film has a sense of humor about itself which carries you through some of the less tolerable scenes.

This is utter tat – an almost complete waste of a movie. The robot security guards that attack the kids look like a cross between the robot out of Short Circuit (1986) and a rubbish-bin. Their voice is quite funny. I might have fallen asleep watching this movie but it’s hard to tell, not much happened so I didn’t miss much. Also most of the time I wanted to grab my phone to see what was on social media, or just see anything interesting. You’d have to be on a lot of drugs to enjoy this.

It's really just a bland horror movie. So bad that it's almost good until you realize that it's just bad.

A **** of teenage mall employees hold a drunken after-hours orgy at the end of their shift, just days after the installation of three roving anti-theft robots on the premises. In a typical bit of B-movie magic, the control suite is struck by half a dozen bolts of lightning and the automatons begin indiscriminately slaughtering everything with two legs and a pulse. Did I mention this is a Roger Corman production? Mired in the trappings of every bad direct-to-video slasher to ever burst upon the scene in the 1980s, Chopping Mall is deliciously, laughably awful. Although they produce sounds on par with a blender set to puree, these bots are able to routinely sneak up on their unsuspecting prey throughout the film, slinking like cats through the night. They're far from intimidating, with bulky tank treads and tiny little T-Rex arms to spin and clap for no particular purpose, but I suppose the kids' fear of them is somewhat justified after seeing a friend's head turned to mash by a well-placed laser shot. Crammed full of stupid decisions, silly special effects, well-glazed acting and ****, ****, ****, it's got everything you'd expect from the genre and the period... except chopping. These monsters prefer to do their killing with beams of searing pink light.