#190: Chopping Mall

Release Date: May 9th, 2025

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Steve Mitchell and Jim Wynorski

Directed by: Jim Wynorski

3 Stars

Here’s a fun riff on the slasher genre: high tech mall robot security guards (think Temu versions of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit) are struck by lightning (also like Johnny 5) and go berzerk, killing mall employees who are trapped in the building after hours. It’s up to a group of three young men working at the mall furniture store and their girlfriends to stop the robots and survive the night. 

I think if I would have seen this with an audience, it would have really come alive. There’s plenty of silly hijinks and even some charm from writer/director Jim Wynorski, working with a sub-$1 million budget and shooting on location at the Sherman Oaks Galleria with inexperienced lead actors and real robots (which seem to kinda work, although it also seems like you could escape them at a brisk walking pace).

So is Chopping Mall an overlooked exploitation masterpiece? Does it transcend the genre and offer some penetrating social commentary about, say, excessive consumerism, or a violent police-state, a la Dawn of the Dead or Robocop? (such analysis has been written about Chopping Mall online, especially in the last decade).

No, Wynorski doesn’t earn those elevated accolades, neither with his ideas nor his filmmaking, as much fun as the movie is. 

At its core, this is still a low-budget, Julie Corman-produced schlocker, shot cheaply and rushed to screen to feed screams and lasers and boobs and blood to dumb, young moviegoers in 1986. 

And what’s wrong with that?