General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Chopping Mall

Chopping Mall is a 1986 American horror comedy film directed by Jim Wynorski, in which eight teenage mall employees are trapped overnight in a shopping mall and hunted by three malfunctioning security robots after a lightning strike corrupts their control system.¹^•² Produced by Julie Corman for Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures, it was first released regionally under the title Killbots, flopped, and was reissued in the fall of 1986 under its better-remembered new title with several minutes of footage trimmed.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Jim Wynorski (director and co-writer) with Steve Mitchell¹
Original title	Released regionally in March 1986 as Killbots; reissued as Chopping Mall in fall 1986 with several minutes trimmed¹
Filming location	Interiors shot at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Sherman Oaks, CA; exteriors of the Beverly Center, Los Angeles¹
Runtime / rating	76 minutes (AFI; AGFA lists 77 min), rated R¹^•³
Critical scores	58% Tomatometer from 12 reviews and 39% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore of 22 on Metacritic²^•⁴
Tagline	"Where Shopping Costs You an Arm and a Leg!"²
Streaming	Available with a subscription on Prime Video and AMC+²

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The Park Plaza Mall installs a new nighttime security system of three Protector robots, developed and monitored by the firm Secure-tronics, programmed to neutralize unauthorized personnel after hours. On the system's first night, an electrical storm fries the controls, and the robots, armed with lasers, begin killing anyone they find. A group of young mall employees who have stayed behind for an after-hours party are sealed inside the locked-down mall with the machines.²^•⁵

The film is a variation on the slasher formula in which the machete-wielding maniac is replaced by robots. Critics at the time read it exactly that way: the Orlando Sentinel called it "a typical mad slasher movie, except the slashers are not mad, not even human," and the Miami Herald noted the predictable deaths of the couples who went "all the way" and the survival of the virgins, alongside what it called the best exploding head sequence since Deadly Friend.⁴ Later reviewers describe the second half as turning into gun battles and booby traps against the machines, ending in something closer to Predator than a standard slasher.⁶

Production

Principal photography began in early January 1986 and was completed four weeks later. The project cycled through working titles: Killbots in an August 1985 trade brief, R.O.B.O.T. and Robot in casting notices, then back to Killbots when shooting started.¹ The production was initially set to film at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles; although exteriors of that mall appear, the interiors were shot at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in California's San Fernando Valley, the location already famous from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and later used by Commando (1985) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).¹^•⁷

The robots. Robert Short Productions of Marina del Rey built the killer robots. Five were constructed, but only two were functional: one controlled by radio transmitter, the other by a box attached to a fifteen-foot cable. The remaining three were "stunt" robots that could be positioned or pulled by cables.¹ Wynorski himself provided the voices of the three Protector robots.⁸

The cast mixes young leads with Corman regulars. Kelli Maroney (Alison Parks) and Tony O'Dell (Ferdy Meisel) head the teens, with John Terlesky, Russell Todd, Karrie Emerson, Barbara Crampton, and Suzee Slater; Dick Miller appears as the janitor Walter Paisley, a reprise of his role from A Bucket of Blood (1959), and Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov appear as the Blands from Eating Raoul (1982), though a sequence involving a horse gag was dropped from the final cut.⁹^•⁷ Wynorski shot the film for under a million dollars, a figure the critic Dennis Schwartz called his greatest accomplishment with it.¹⁰

Release and retitle

The film opened regionally in March 1986 as Killbots and did poorly at the box office.¹^•¹¹ Roger Corman decided the title was the problem, renamed it Chopping Mall, and reissued it in the fall of 1986 with several minutes of footage trimmed, cutting a new campaign around a poster of a robot arm holding a carrier bag full of severed limbs.¹^•¹² The reissue opened in the Pittsburgh, PA, area on September 5, 1986, and in New York City on November 14, 1986.¹ The American Cinematographer account notes that the rebranded poster shifted the focus off the robots and onto the setting.¹¹

A television version later added aerial stock footage of Los Angeles, extra robot-technician dialogue, and extended scenes of Alison and Ferdy watching Attack of the Crab Monsters on a TV set, a small homage to that 1957 Corman film.⁸

Reception and afterlife

Contemporary critics were largely negative. Metacritic records a Metascore of 22, with three of four collected reviews negative; The A.V. Club's Tasha Robinson found it "cheap, rushed, and often apathetically thrown together" outside its violence and nudity scenes.⁴ Retrospective assessment has been warmer. Dennis Schwartz gave it a C+ as "an inane but entertaining horror comedy";² James Kendrick of the Q Network Film Desk praised its "no-frills exploitation ethos" and economy while calling the title misleading, since nothing is actually chopped.² On Rotten Tomatoes the film stands at 58% from 12 critics and 39% from more than 5,000 audience ratings.²

Cult standing. The film has endured as a minor cult favorite, valued for its 1980s aesthetic, its knowing humor, and its use of the mall setting.⁵ Academic work has taken its consumerist setting seriously: Morten Feldtfos Thomsen, a senior lecturer in comparative literature at Karlstad University, reads the film as centering on a coalescence of "law and order" conservatism, corporate capitalism, and military power in the Reagan era, while arguing that it does not reject capitalism but presents the mall as a potentially emancipatory synthesis of youth culture and consumerism.¹³ Reviewers have also noted that the security company's pitch of automated patrol and threat assessment without a human in the loop reads today as a product announcement rather than science fiction.¹²

Home video has sustained the film's reputation: Vestron Video's Collector's Series Blu-ray release remains in circulation among collectors.¹⁴ In 2011, producer Robert Hall's Dry Country Entertainment announced it had acquired remake rights, with Hall set to direct a version with a "darker, supernatural spin" for a planned spring 2012 shoot; no additional information about that remake has been found.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Comedy horror films › 20th-century comedy horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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