Chopping Mall has gotten a reputation as a “cult classic,” enough for its scene with Dick Miller to get a slot in the opening of each Dead Meat podcast, so I definitely wasn’t going into it expecting it to be some sort of art film. It’s definitively 1980s B-movie horror. But I hadn’t expected it to be so self-consciously 1980s B-movie horror.
It felt as if they’d stopped trying to come up with ideas after they’d hit on the title. And honestly, who can blame them, since it’s such a good title. Nothing that I could come up with for a title for this blog post would be able to compete, but I still wanted to share all the alternates.
Or, Sherman Oaks Killeria
The movie takes place in an unspecified mall somewhere in Los Angeles — an exterior shot with a street sign suggests it’s Beverly Center, but the credits say it was filmed inside the Sherman Oaks Galleria — that has just installed a new state-of-the-art security system. Huge steel doors automatically seal up all of the entrances and exits at night, and a trio of robots will be patrolling the floors, ready to subdue intruders until the police can be called in the next morning.
Unfortunately, a group of horny young mall workers have decided to stay after hours and have an orgy inside a furniture store. These are men and women in their late 20s who, for some reason, are working in a mall and still have to ask for their parents’ permission to go to a party.
And I say “orgy,” but it really looks like some awkward dancing, a chance for each of the ladies to present their breasts to the camera for exactly one (1) shot, and then sex in the beds which we’re explicitly told does not include oral.
To make matters worse, one of the rainless thunderstorms that Los Angeles is famous for is happening that night, and a few bolts of lightning strike an electrical box on the roof, causing the mall’s sophisticated computer system to go haywire and turn all of the protector robots murderous.
Or, Boston Market Dynamics
The movie makes its intentions completely clear from the start. The security company’s presentation starts with a film of the robots tasering a jewel thief, and then has a Q&A session to set up the premise to a crowd of people that includes Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel playing their characters from 1982’s Eating Raoul.
I don’t know why that is, and to be honest I don’t care enough to do any research beyond checking to see if the movies had prominent cast or crew in common. As far as I can tell, it’s simply an extended cameo, and an announcement that this movie intends to be black comedy satire in a similar vein to that movie. I’ve never seen Eating Raoul, but if that movie is sophisticated and clever as the commentary and the eye-rolling and mugging for the camera that Woronov and Bartel deliver in Chopping Mall, then I will never be seeing Eating Raoul.
It calms down a bit after that opening sequence, but the same spirit carries on throughout Chopping Mall. It feels as if the filmmakers are desperate for the audience to understand that they’re film buffs, and that this is all an homage to B-movies.
Dick Miller’s character’s name is Walter Paisley, the same as he played in Roger Corman movies. The mall pet store (that sells tarantulas) is named “Little House of Pets.” The sporting goods store where the guys stock up on shotguns, revolvers, and assault weapons is called “Peckinpah’s.” They didn’t feel like sly references so much as making sure to signal that they were in on the joke.
As much as I tried to get into the spirit of the whole experience, I kept being knocked out of it. The only clip that I’d seen from Chopping Mall has proto-Robin Scherbatsky character Linda, after an angry outburst, saying, “I guess I’m just not used to being chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots.” I’d assumed that the movie would be more wryly self-aware, instead of constantly asking the audience, “Get it?!“
Or, LCD Killsystem
The most surprising thing to me in Chopping Mall is that it actually came out before Robocop. I would’ve bet anything that it was a parody made cheaply and quickly to cash in on that movie’s popularity.
And there’s something that feels weirdly mercenary and made-for-TV about the whole thing. All of the scene transitions are, jarringly, preceded by a fade to black, as if the movie was intended from the start to be commercial TV-friendly. For a while, I thought that had to be some kind of weird stylistic flourish, since this movie was clearly R-rated. But then I realized that all of the nudity happens in carefully composed shots that might as well have frame markers at the beginning and end, to make it easier to edit them out for broadcast. The single f-bomb could’ve been easily bleeped out, and the one shot of feature-caliber violence could’ve been cut as well.
A point that’s actually in the movie’s favor: it’s got all of the pop culture signifiers of the 1980s that you’d expect, especially from a movie set in a mall, but it also has reminders of just how long ago the 1980s actually were. It’s not just some blandly nostalgic self-contained world of malls, neon, perms, and leg warmers. There are cigarette machines in this mall, and a character complains about how expensive they are, at $1.50 a pack!
That means I could remember myself in the 1980s, when I would’ve been much more inclined to like a movie like this. Comedy was broader, my tolerance for showy self-awareness was a lot higher, and I probably would’ve gotten a kick out of how self-consciously and intentionally stupid it was.
Plus, it’s easy to forget how much more accessible movies are in 2026, and how much easier it is to get info about them and find like-minded fans. The references probably would’ve seemed less obvious back then. And I would’ve seen Gerrit Graham’s small part in this and thought “oh cool, I like that guy!” instead of “oh man, this is gonna be corny as all hell.”
But as it is, it just felt like it was filmmakers deliberately aiming for the Lowest Common Denominator and convinced that they were better than the material. I would’ve been a lot more into it if they’d just gone for it, and proudly made a B-movie without all of the baggage.
After all, the best scene in the entire thing is when one of the robots shoots a laser at a woman running through the mall in her underwear, and her head just straight-up explodes. When you’ve got something that reaches that kind of heights, why not just commit to it?
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