Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Chopping Mall!

Theme: Mallrats - Wax

Don't be disappointed that the best parody slasher movie title you could wish for was bestowed upon a movie with no masked killer, nor any chopping to speak of; rather, be thankful that it was bestowed upon the 80s' greatest killer robot and exploding head kino, which thereby mogs into irrelevancy Terminator and Scanners at a single stroke.

Sadly, my DVD boasts a resolution of 1p, which is so low it doesn't even exist.

Besides this hapless young lady (Suzee Slater, spelled like that), Mall stars such A-list artistes as John Terlesky (Deathstalker 2) and Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, From Beyond and Castle Freak). The plot is simple, in the euphemism-for-retarded sense: the owners of a mall replace Paul Blart Mall Blart with killer robots. Shenanigans ensue when horny redshirts* get stuck in the mall overnight and are hunted by the killer robots, which malfunction by using their deadly weapons to kill people! I have the same problem with my garage door remote all the time.

The sensible tank treads and low centre of gravity make them much harder to knock down than goofy bipedal killer robots. One does get upended at one point but it has an inbuilt jack for righting itself. They thought of everything, except not having them sped out and kill people.

In the top ten robots of entertainment, I rank the Paul Bot Mall Cops third only to Robby from Forbidden Planet and Robert from Fireball XL5. The fact I can't even remember any other cool robots should do little to minimise the pedigree of this auspicious distinction.

Actually, now I think of it, these guys from the Star Wars prequels were kino af and probably the coolest-looking things in that entire franchise.

But our heroes don't go down without a fight, and much fun is had with them looting stores for props and weapons to use against the robots. The enclosed nature of the mall setting would make it close to a Die Hard ripoff as well, only it predates Die Hard by a year (though, fun fact, the Die Hard script was in development hell for so long it was originally set to star Frank Sinatra). Not only should you watch Chopping Mall, but you should write to the studios and castigate them for their stupidity and worthlessness in failing to produce kinos of this calibre on a regular basis**. The continental United States is now filled with abandoned malls; chop chop!

Average mall in 2025 (colourised).

*Several characters are waitresses employed at the mall who wear a red uniform, which is possibly deliberate Star Trekian foreshadowing of doom, but then again possibly not.

**And for all the rape.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Creature from the Black Lagoon!

Theme: Dragon's Child - Iced Earth

The Universal classic monster movies have been more endearing than unnerving since about 1950 at the latest. I can't tell you late entry Creature from the Black Lagoon is any exception, but it's my favourite and the best regardless. The design of the titular Creature, more often referred to as the Gillman, is so GOATed it makes me unreasonably mad that Universal didn't make more horrors based on original treatments over the well-worn sources of Victorian novels and folklore.

The Gillman rocks 16-pack abs. Personal trainers HATE him. What's his secret? Click to find out!

Creature dropped in 3D back when that was cool (1954, and not a year later). While 3D would become synonymous with B-joint schlock and, worse, Avatar (2009), in 1954 it inspired a more kino grandiosity. You don't open a picture much bigger than this:

Based.

We then flash forward a bunch to the 50s, when the good ship Rita explores the waters of the Amazon, where dwells the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)! Tormented!'s Richard Carlson leads the cast beside Julia Adams, who becomes the locus of the Gillman's foreveralone affections. In a curiously poignant sequence, he observes her from below in the act of not-quite-synchronised swimming:

Fortunately Julia at no point looks down, prompting you to wonder who's just out of your own field of vision right now and for the next few weeks.

The most hilariously dated aspect of this movie is the Creature's bombastic leitmotif, which goes (and this is highly technical musical notation) "Dahn-dahn-DAAHN, dahn-dahn-DAAHN", etc. whenever the Creature or, more often (likely to spare the stuntman who played him donning the entire elaborate kit all the time), his hand appears.

I'm tempted to make an Airplane!esque parody in which he reaches through people's windows to grab popcorn and stuff, yelling "dahn-dahn-DAAHN" the entire time.

I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to make a proper R-rated horror remake of Creature that was actually scary. Images like his webbed footprints in the sand seem like they would lend themselves well to found footage, if anyone still makes those, though with the coolness of the costume maybe you'd want proper camerawork and lighting to show it off to its best effect.

Working title: The Black Lagoon Project OC DO NAHT STEAL

Like Bride of Frankenstein, the Creature's story was redundantly extended through two sequels, neither of which are particularly essential viewing and, given that they extend his streak of striking out with human women, seem a bit like piling on. My version would give the Gillman the happy ending he deserves: after being arrested for mauling the explorers who rudely interrupt his daily swim, Ol' Gil is sentenced to life in Seaworld (this is more or less the plot of the second one, if memory serves), but his trainer (Sidney Sweeney) is won over by his amphibious charm and they escape together on the back of that orca from Free Willy, then kill and eat it because fuck orcas, they murder seals for fun.

Gamers rise up.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Shining!

Theme: Hotel California - The Eagles

Which clues did you overlook?

Stanley Kubrick's kinos are the most talked-about in the history of the medium, in large part because, like his mutual influence David Lynch (Kubrick screened Eraserhead for the Shining cast to put them in the right mood), he was a cryptic son of a bitch. The Shining might even edge out his own Eyes Wide Shut for the most theorised-upon of films, with each viewer convinced it has some deeper meaning than the surface-level narrative suggests. Is it about the gold standard? Generational abuse? Occult themes? This is hilarious because it makes Stephen King seethe; he wanted everyone to appreciate his deep takes on alcoholism (bad) and white peephole (worse).

"And then the spooky ghost said...THE HECKIN EN WOOORD NOOO HELP ME NІGGERMAN I'M GOING INSAAAANE AAAAAGH" - Stephen King, The Shining, page 1.

Personally, I suspect Kubrick's real deeper meaning was specifically to mock King: I'm reliably informed the wrecked car in this scene is the make and model driven by Jack in the novel, in a cheeky visual metaphor for Kubrick smashing King's sophomoric vision beneath his own weightier take:

Yeah, I'm not going to look it up. I'm pretty sure Rob Ager confirmed it, but he has four hundred and twenty billion videos about The Shining so if you want to find which one, happy hunting.

Not content to limit his trolling to King alone, Kubrick further ridiculed the characters and plot with subliminal details like having Wendy dress like Goofy, and the cast by demanding ludicrous numbers of identical takes for random line readings. But whatever hidden meanings may have been intended, it's the hypnotic mood of the picture that makes it one of the most rewatchable of kinographs. To be honest, I never found it scary at all, but really funny, but I don't think that's a problem or even altogether unintentional. Nicholson's famous "here's Johnny" line was an ad-lib that Kubrick kept in despite his reputation for autismal micromanagement, most likely because it's a great laugh line and Kubrick found the material funny and the fact most of the audience were baffled by it funnier. He also hated furfags ahead of the curve:

"Yiff in hell subhumans" - Kubrick in the editing room, doing the Kubrick stare.

But if we're to put on our serious hats, the most persuasive theory about The Shining to me is the pedo one: Jack reads a Playgirl magazine with an article about incest, which has been widely interpreted to mean he's fucking little Danny, and quotes Lolita (the novel about a guy trying to justify fucking a 12-y/o girl, which Kubrick adapted in the 60s) when attempting to talk down Wendy from trying to fend him off with a baseball bat. This is by no means incompatible with my fuck-Stephen-King interpretation, because King later wrote a child orgy in It, so it's entirely possible Kubrick was calling King (the author with the drinking problem) a nonce via his literally-him stand-in Jack.

Pedos in the glamorous world of entertainment? Well now I've heard everything.

Just for fun though, here's a wildly different theory that makes you go hmm in an altogether contradictory direction. Perhaps the fact the same movie can be spun off into what seem like endless variations of interpretation is what makes it so perennially fascinating. You'll be watching it forever...and ever...and ever.