Chopping Mall (1986) of America

"Fuck the fuchsia, it's Friday!"

I mentioned Chopping Mall (1986) in my recent post about genre, so now I have to talk about Chopping Mall. Everything you really need to know is in the image above: it's a horny and hilarious 80s time-capsule of sci-fi horror with everything that's great and not so great about horror movies and American culture during that decade.

It's an ad from Robocop come to life, and if made today it would be considered too on the nose depiction of the 80s.

The shopping mall montage at the start (the only time we get to see the mall in daylight, as filming was restricted to night time and an empty mall) shows happy, industrious shoppers going about their day, enjoying commerce and socialising at the mall. There's skateboarding, food courts, arcade machines, girls in bikinis (for some reason), prat falls, big hair, and generally a prosperous white middle-class America captured in time. We've moved on from having to explain what a mall is in Dawn of the Dead (1978) to celebrating it as the official third place of proud Americans.

The setup could not be more 80s slasher coded: a bunch of (white, straight, cis) teens/young adults stay behind at the mall that they work at to party (with alcohol and sex), only to be killed off by newly installed corporate mall security robots turned murderously rogue by an errant lightning strike.

It really is a Robocop ad come to life: teens looking to have a good time being killed by property to protect property is as American as apple pie. While the killer bots (the original name of the film itself) are clearly the bad guys, all the people in the film basically think of them as annoying but an inevitable sign of progress. Dick Miller even says, prior to his inevitable demise, "I'm like you, you know? I work here." It's not a Verhoevenesque critique of American police state capitalism run rampant, but there's an edge of anxiety here about technology replacing people.

There's a tongue-cheek charm to this, and it's decidedly not scary, but the teens/young adults in this are all quite charming and sympathetic, so you do feel for them once the bots start knocking them off one by one.

As the header image to this article might give you a hint, this movie is very horny and male-gazey. While the awesome leading lady/final girl Alison and her ingenuity and aim with a Molotov cocktail might have you think otherwise, it really still is unfortunately sexist. It's not the worst the 80s had to offer in this, and it doesn't feel quite as voyeuristic or hateful as many of its contemporaries, but equally there are a lot of tits in this one. Depending on where you stand this makes the movie less or more appealing but it is an unquestionably 80s choice.

The kids ultimately prevail after a legendary tool up montage where the attempt to solve the robot problem by going to the local hardware store and picking up shotguns, pistols, and an assault rifle. The kids from Stranger Things could learn a thing or two from actual 80s kids.

While the initial assault is successful, ultimately the technologically superior force prevails and the final girl, Alison, is forced to use insurgency tactics to defeat the final remaining robot with a slippery trap in a paint shop, followed by a precisely delivered incendiary flare. It's hardly a treatise on the ongoing Cold War, America's failures in Vietnam, or the conflict between corporate overreach and the collective future generation, where the teens that don't have pre-marital sex will be triumphant and live to see another day. But it's there, in the deep, deep background just behind the gratuitous nudity, paper thing characterisation and 80s practical effects.

For all its flaws and Reaganite "white Americans kids with easy access to guns and a good attitude can solve any problem" belief system, I do love this movie. It's not actually scary but there is real pathos to some of the performances and you feel the grief of these teens being killed in this silly horror action comedy than you do in many much more po-faced attempts at horror. And for all its silliness and camp, the irony of the late 80s and 90s hasn't seeped in yet: it's all very earnest and genuine, in a way that captures the naïve optimism of the 80s.

Other things to love about this film:

• John Terlesky's shit eating grin should be studied in a lab, and no one has ever chewed gum and the scenery simultaneously on screen like he does in this. You can see why he was cast in Deathstalker II, which released the following year.

• Dick Miller shows up for a cameo (death), which is worth at least an extra 10 points on Metacritic for any movie
• The legend Barbara Crampton somehow fit this in between her iconic Lovecraft duo of Re-Animator and From Beyond
• The synth soundtrack slaps. Just listen to this banger of a main title
• Kelli Maroney is a contender for The Best Final Girl: she brings such an effortless charm that you can't help but immediately root for her

Happy 40th, Chopping Mall and I hope you all...