CHOPPING MALL!! Robots...with lasers!

Mall security guards. Those three words conjure in your mind the image of nature’s most wondrous combination of hiked-up pants and birth defects. Malls hire these people because, well, we have to put them somewhere. The America of the 2000s says, “Give people a chance.” The America of the ‘80s says, “Fuck that, pussy.” Chopping Mall asks the question you and I have been asking for years: “why hire the retarded when you can hire robots with lasers?”

Chopping Mall is about a group of kids who throw a party in a mall after it closes, only to have their awesomely mulletted heads literally handed to them by the mall’s malfunctioning robot security guards. The robots are so born to kill that I’m surprised no one in Hollywood is jumping all over an Alien vs. Predator vs. Chopping Mall. Let’s look at the technical readout. Our robotic rent-a-cops are armed with tasers, and retractable metal claws capable of removing 80s catch phrase-spouting larynxs from throats. I also think they’re equipped with stealth technology, considering that no one in the movie seems to hear them until they’re heads are being crushed by the robots’ commerce-protecting treads. I know the above arsenal could take out a police force or two—much less the guy who takes an extra toothpicked sample from the food court’s Chinese restaurant—but if these weapons didn’t work, the robots also have—when they’re not spending half the movie forgetting that they have them—laser beams. Laser beams that sound like this: “Peeew! Peeew! Na na na na!! Peeeew Peeeeeeeew!”

Just because I’m going to spend the rest of this article talking about the robot’s lasers, don’t think that that was my only problem with Chopping Mall. It wasn’t. I had a lot. But people, let me tell you something. I’ve lived through two “wars,” and in all the media coverage I watched at work when I should’ve been writing horror movie reviews during time I should’ve spent working, I never saw us deploy anything that shot lasers. But apparently, in 1986, there was some mall that has three laser-shooting robot security guards. Motherfucker, South Park Mall is the nicest mall in North Carolina and just last year they got toilets that flush by themselves. Speaking of, they also have a guy with a tip jar in the bathroom. I stiff him every time I go in, and I've never had to duck anything that looked like a laser beam because of it. And what kind of crimes are going on in malls that require robots with lasers? I know that every now and then someone will bring a coke into Ambercrombie. I know that sometimes, kids think it’s funny to walk up the “down” escalator. You could put an end to both of these with signs. Last time I checked, Osama was flying planes into our Trade Centers, not our Orange Julius’s. Let’s get those robots out of the Kay-Bees and into the front lines where they need to be.



Perhaps Chopping Mall was a metaphor for the American government’s missallcoation of resources, or perhaps it was just a great way to show me tits, robots, and head explosions. The answer to that question we may never know, but we will know this: I give Chopping Mall three Jason heads, making it this season’s highest scorer. Here’s why. Movies just don’t come any more fun than this, especially 20 years after they were made. It earned all three of those stars because it’s a huge clusterfuck of ‘80s film stereotypes that, at the time, were cool, and to think I live in a country were there was a time when this shit was ever cool really makes me smile.