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.