 Hello and welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies and today we've got 1986's Chopping Mall for you. This was a request by Peter Paleocastritis. If that's your real ass name. But before we get started, what are we drinking? Today again, we are drinking Death Ship. Yeah, because I forgot all my goddamn beer. Chopping Mall is directed by Jim Wynorski and he also directed Return of Swamp Thing, 976 Evil Part 2 and basically just a boatload of schlocky, fun, cheesy, whore exploitation movies. Barbara Crampton is in this and she was in Reanimator and From Beyond. Kelly Moroni is in this, she's in the Wicked 80's movie Night of the Comet and also another Wicked 80's movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And Dick Miller's in this. He was in Everything. That's a good gun. Chopping Mall starts off with this guy robbing a store in a mall. Super 80's super good music and then these robots start fucking chasing him down in the mall like what the hell? They all shoot him down. Then you realize you're actually watching a video presentation from these people demonstrating this new technology, this new mall technology security system. Foolproof! Uh huh, of course it is. These robots are basically three. There's one per floor. They say take down any robbers and intruders, but they'll also recognize staff. Trust me, nothing can go wrong. We're then introduced to some of the main characters here. Of course they're all people who work at the mall. Two girls at the burger joint. Watching some fucking slob good stuff his face. The chef guy? Come on, come on, come on girls. What's next? What's next? He's all smoking while he's preparing everybody's meal. His shirts full of all his shit and everything. More butter. There's a bunch of guys working at this furniture store. And they're talking about how they're gonna close down the store and have a party in the store after. And one guy, the nerdy guy, is a little kind of like hesitant. I gotta find the fuchsia! Fuck the fuchsia! Meantime there's these like these scientist guys in like the computer room, I guess, oversee the robots. And one of them is Garrett Graham who is in Phantom of the Paradise, is beef. All those lightning hits, of course, lightning hits. Yeah, it has to be lightning. Fries all the circuits in the computer room and the robots have now gone haywire. The first target is one of the scientist guys, throat slit by the mall robots. Janitor and he's all mopping up all this shit, all this like milkshake and all this like... Damn kid. Yeah, he's all swearing under his breath. And then one of the robots comes up to him and dumps over the bucket of water. He's like, what the hell, you bucket of junk, you piece of garbage, what are you doing? Identification, please. And he's kind of hesitant, he's like, ah whatever, identification. So he finally shows it, but the thing's all haywire and it electrocutes the water that he's standing in. He's all fidgeting and frying up. Furniture King, House of Royal Deals. Good tagline. They're all kind of getting together and partying, start having sex and everything pretty close to each other. Yeah, literally just over there. I need my cigarettes. He's like, well, I saw a pack of camels over there. He's like, you know I only smoke virgin lights. So reluctantly, he's all chewing that gum. You know, smoking's bad for your health. And then it cuts to Dick Miller all steaming. There's that cigarette machine, that knobs. Those knobs you pull, yeah, that takes me back. Oh yeah, I remember like, you know my mom or whatever she put the coin in. Okay, he pulled that knob. One of the robots comes up to him and wants to see his identification. He gets close and he actually shows it to the robot. And the robot grabs his throat. But you don't really see what happens to him yet. His girlfriend Leslie, she needs her smoke's bad so she goes looking for him and she comes up to him and turns him over and she sees that his throat's been slit. And then the robot comes out of the darkness and starts chasing her, starts shooting all these lasers at her ass and everything. She gets up to the furniture store to scream and the robot blows her head up, like right off. Except for the running man as far as exploding head scenes. Chico! The robots converge there and they go right through the windows towards the kids and chases the kids into this back storeroom. So the guys put the girls up into the vents to take off and the guys get out of the storeroom and they go to a gun shop to go load up. This is where we get the nice 80s montage of all, you know they get the guns, the ammo and everything and the propane tanks. And they devise a plan to start taking out these robots. The girls in the meantime, they're still in the vents kind of debating what to do, you know. Do we follow the guys, do we go back? And on top of all of this, the robots are still circling around fucking making sure that the floors are clean. That's where we're going to end it, so if you want to see what's going to happen with all our cast of characters, keep watching 1986's Chopping Mall. So why should you watch Chopping Mall? If you couldn't tell already. By what we're wearing. The movie's pretty fucking awesome and it's the total 80s package. Yeah. It's like everything you want in a killer 80s movie. That's right. Right from the get go, the music. That's right. Opening scene. Super DX7 synths. It takes you back. It certainly took us back to when the mall was the place to be. When malls were cool, malls, they had trees in them and like plants. None of our malls here have like plants or trees anymore. You know, fun cool stuff. They're all cold and desolate nowadays. Yeah, sterile. Back then there used to be a lot of stuff happening in these malls. Pageants, like you said. Yeah, pageants, the demonstrations. Like remember your dad, even with that 3D wheel thing that they put him in? Yeah, stuff like that. The arcades in the mall. Or even we, when we took judo class, our judo class had a judo demonstration in a mall. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. In the mall. You don't see that anymore in judo class happening in the mall. Like that's what you did back then. Yeah. So this has a lot of nostalgia too. The fashion is nostalgia that the look of the mall is nostalgia. Simply just is a window in time. Oh yeah, that's all it is. That's all it is. They're not trying to be anything more than what it is. No, it's super 80s because it was made in the 80s. The characters too in this movie are all awesome and they're all very distinct, right? You can point them out, no problem. Very distinct, yeah. You got the guy who saw his chewing gum, like the kind of stronger jock sort of guy, right? The snarky asshole kind of. Then you got your nerd kids and then the girls, right? There's some nerdy ones. There's the hot valley girl one. I really like Kelly Moroni's character. The plain Jane, not having sex with, you know, she's just hanging out in the couch with the nerdy guy. But then she ends up being a super badass because she like was a military girl or whatever so she can shoot the guns and all that stuff. And she ends up being like what the quote, final girl. And she kicks a major ass. Yeah, that's right. She even devises the whole plan at the end. The dialogue in this movie is great because it's witty and it's funny. It's natural. It's like, okay, it doesn't seem like it's just written. It seems like, okay, these people, they're really talking. People really talk like this. Bitchin' bodacious! We're gonna party to the max! It sounds kind of ridiculous now, but that's kind of how people talk back then. Yeah, like I wonder, I don't know too much about the making of this movie besides director Pick Roger Corman's brain a lot because Roger Corman's company produced the movie. I know like a lot of movies, the writers and directors are like chilling out and they hear the kids talking and they write some of that stuff into the movie while they're filming because it's like, okay, this is how the kids talk. That may have happened here, I'm not sure, but... Yeah, it's not how I think they talk, it's how they actually talk. Like in April Fool's Day, like that's a perfect example where a lot of the dialogue was written while they were filming because the director heard kids speaking this way. One thing I really like about this movie is the kids actually seem like they're all friends but they're all different, but they're still friends, you know? They're all the same, it's like when we were in high school we had a big group of friends but we're all different we weren't all the same, we weren't all jocks we weren't all drama class kids, we were just a big group of friends. That's what this movie is, and they work together they're not always bickering and at odds, like a little bit but for the most part they work together and they actually have a plan. They're just not running away. They set out, okay, well there's a problem here the fucking robots, let's go deal with them. They set out to go do it. Actions of all the characters make sense to me. It's logical things that you would do in that situation. You're not sitting watching this movie going like why did you do that? Well who would do it? You're not yelling at the screen, you're like okay yeah, that's what I would do. Actions of the characters are natural. It doesn't take away from what they're trying to achieve in the movie, you know. The actions of all the characters make logical sense. The flow of this movie makes sense too. You get a couple of kills and then the kids freak out they take off and just the way the pacing and the way it goes is great. The pacing and the editing is really good. The way it's edited is very smart. Just like the line we said we're like smoking's bad for your health and it cuts right to Dick Miller all steaming. Simple but effective editing like that. It makes the movie just flow so perfectly. The robots are a big part of this movie, right? Because they're your main bad guy. And they're pretty fucking awesome. And this is pre-Robocop. So these are pre-Robocop law enforcement robots. And they're hard to take down. Like the kids got guns. They even throw propane tanks and like makeshift Molotov cocktails. You can't defeat these fucking things. It makes for a great adversary. More than one. That's the thing is there's multiple of them. Yeah and they even throw little twists where you think that they're defeated and then they're not. Yeah you think that there's two down and there's only one left to take down. And then... The other one comes out and you're like oh I thought we got that one. It's like okay now you gotta do it too. The use of the mall in this movie is fantastic. Because why put it in a mall if you don't use the mall to its full advantage? And they do. Party in the furniture store. Going to the sporting goods store to get the guns. When they're all exhausted and they're kind of like trying to think of a game plan, they're in the restaurant area like snacking on food. And near the end when they go to the paint store and she uses the paint to her advantage to make the floors all slick for the robot. Stuff like that like it's put it in the mall so you can use all the stories. Exactly. It's all to the story you know. It's all there. Unlike Dawn of the Dead remake which we covered where they don't do any of that. So why put it in a mall if you're not gonna use the mall? Exactly. And they use the mall perfectly. Going through the docks all that stuff. And the elevators they use all that as part of the storytelling. I like too how this movie plays on the fear of technology going rogue on you, right? And I mean this is the 80s when all this kind of shit was getting big. Computers were fucking exploding everywhere, right? And so everybody was afraid of this very thing happening. So they kind of took the idea and ran with it. And we still are. Exactly. It's only gonna get worse. AI and all that stuff. It's still a thing. It's still relevant. It's still relevant. Totally. The effects in this movie are really good. The robots look good. And they look robust. They don't look all cheap and plasticky. They look like they can take some shit. The head exploding is good. A lot of really good effects. There's that one girl that gets set on fire and she's running around and then she lays down she's still on fire. But it doesn't look like a big fat Halloween tube. The fire suit. Yeah it doesn't look like a fire suit. You always know a good fire effect. When it doesn't look like they're dressed for winter. Yeah exactly. As soon as the robots are on the loose it's like It's still on the loose. It's still on the loose. It's relentless really. This movie is relentless. So basically if you want a movie that has it all and it's wrapped into a nice neat little 80s package then I think this is the movie for you. There's not much more to say. This movie has everything. This genre wrapped into one movie. You know it's comedy. It's horror. It's sci-fi. It's action. It's everything. Yeah it's everything. And if any of you fans have a copy of Chopping Mall on VHS please feel free to contact us and send it our way because we once had a copy but we lost it. Wandering around the woods pissed off a moonshine. And the last thing you want is someone finding it before you have a chance to go back and look for it again. We had the cops involved. We were a band from the flea market after. It was a big ordeal. We made it. We made it Justin. We're gonna get you to a doctor. We're gonna get you to a doctor. Listen it all happened here. Right here. We got jumped over there. You got poisoned up the moonshine right here. We can't have it finding that tape in the woods. We got to get together on this thing. I understand that. Justin. We have to change the story. I think they found part of the plastic from the tape in the woods. Justin. What happened after that last shot of moonshine? I don't remember nothing. Nothing. Just before you go buddy let me just ask you something. How come you come back with no tapes? Wasn't there a way he didn't find one? Why was it he didn't find one? We forgot to bring cash. Why was it you forgot to bring cash? I don't know. Don't you ever do nothing like this again. Don't you come back up here. Well you don't have to worry about that Sheriff. I kind of like to see this flea market die peaceful.