REVIEW:
This cheesy forgotten slasher from the 80's has gotten such a good reputation for itself among horror fans that I decided to give it a go. After finished watching it I have one question that remains unanswered; why is this movie so attractive. This was really just another 80's slasher but with killer robots and a whole lot of plot holes. To name a few plot holes, first of all, the robots are quite big and still they manage to go on an escalator pretty well, another thing is that they shoot constantly and it looks as if the teens are hit like a 100 times but they never even get a wound. As if that wasn't enough, it only has a running time of 70 minutes.

This was the second movie Jim Wynorski directed in his life as a director. He has managed to get quite a few of his films on the slasherpool bottom charts through the years, including films like Project V.I.P.E.R. and Cheerleader Massacre. Thankfully, this movie wasn't quite as bad as those since this had a more entertaining cheese factor surrounding it and his directing actually looked better then than it does today. Pretty descent acting from this quite unknown cast though, surprisingly enough. Sure it wasn't great but it was as good as it could possibly get for this movie, except from the fat guy who says "waitress, more butter", they should have just cut that line out.

So up to this point I have done nothing but badtalk this movie but there are positive things about it as well. Chopping Mall is awfully 80's and I think it's always nice to be able to see that the time has influenced a movie so much. The robots look pretty good and realistic as well for the time being. The special effects are nothing to get excited about but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun watching these small robots shooting laser beams at people. I really had gotten the wrong idea of how this movie was going to be but I didn't end up hating it, it just wasn't as good as I had hoped that it would be.

GORE:
Now to the big let down. I was told that this was supposed to be one hell of a gory horror movie, which it certainly wasn't. There was one good kill where a person gets shot by a laser beam in the head so that the head explodes but other than that, the goriest thing we get is a slit throat.

SOUNDTRACK:
As suspected this was just packed with music that we would rather just forget. This score contained nothing but cheesy 80's synthesizer music but it did help building the atmosphere so it wasn't completely worthless.

BOTTOM LINE:
How come the worst horror movies always have the coolest titles? Chopping Mall really wasn't very good despite the reputation that it has gotten. I do believe that only true 80's fans will be able to enjoy this movie as it just isn't very entertaining today. Watching a couple of teens getting shot by killer robots sure sounds like my kind of movie but the robots weren't very scary and neither was the movie.