Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski, 1986)

Chopping Mall, originally released unsuccessfully as Killbots before a re-edit and title change turned it into a cult hit, is one of those quintessential '80s time capsules that is pretty hard to deny if you grew up in that era. And, yes, people like to point out that the title doesn't exactly make sense because the killer robots blast people with lasers instead of chopping them into bits, but c'mon, Chopping Mall is a great title, and it fits the spirit of the movie way better than the more accurate Killbots.Whatever you call it, you get killer robots inside a shopping mall with a cast full of cult favorites including Barbara Crampton, Kelli Maroney, Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, and Gerrit Graham. Yeah, those last four are just cameos, but they're solid cameos.

Filmed at the Sherman Oaks Galleria (the same mall used in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, though, from the looks of Chopping Mall, the Galleria received an '80s makeover in the interim), Chopping Mall's mall is debuting three new overnight security guards who just happen to be robots. These supposedly fool-proof robot mall guards turn into killers when their control system's roof antenna is hit by lightning. Unfortunately for all of us, a group of party animals in their early twenties have decided to dance, drink, have sex, and watch Roger Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters in the mall's furniture store after hours.

Let's introduce this quintessentially '80s group by gender, as was the style of the time. The boys: We have the man who is reluctantly making this furniture store beer bash happen, the nerdy Ferdy (The Karate Kid's Tony O'Dell; also the second Head of the Class series regular who has been in a movie reviewed on this site in the last month), the store's bookkeeper and the nephew of the owner; his coworkers Mike (John Terlesky), an overconfident jock with sex and beer on the brain, and Greg (Nick Segal, nephew of George Segal, who chucked his acting career aside after a few movie and TV roles to work in real estate), a preppier, less meathead version of Mike; and Rick (Russell Todd), a leather-jacketed mysterious bad boy type. The only things uniting our disparate band of dudes are horniness and easy access to a furniture store in the mall. And, eventually, malfunctioning robots trying to kill them.

Last, but certainly not least, the ladies: Rick's wife Linda (Karrie Emerson), a sexy yet rugged type who knows how to fix the engine of a pickup truck and make Molotov cocktails; sexy sex bomb Leslie (Suzee Slater), girlfriend of Mike and daughter of the mall's clothing store owner, who knows what she wants and knows how to get it; sexy party animal with a heart of gold Suzie (Re-Animator's Barbara Crampton), a waitress in the mall's diner and Greg's girlfriend; and, finally, Suzie's coworker, sexy seemingly naive goody-two-shoes Alison (Night of the Comet's Kelli Maroney), who is secretly not so naive.

Ferdy continues freaking out about the party at his uncle's store (key line from Greg after Ferdy says the party can't start until he finds a missing fuchsia pattern for a customer: "Fuck the fuchsia. It's Friday!"), but changes his tune when he gets one look at Alison. The mall closes. The dance party begins. (This movie really makes it seem like a blast to party in a furniture store after hours, minus the killer robots.) Beer is chugged (our lovable nerds Ferdy and Alison drink wine). After the beer is chugged, every couple starts having sex, except for Ferdy and Alison, who watch Attack of the Crab Monsters and make out a little bit. Greg offends Suzie by telling her she smells like pepperoni, but she is coaxed back to the sofa when he says, "Hey, I LIKE pepperoni!"

After everyone's horniness is somewhat satiated, Leslie sends Mike to the cigarette machine to get her a pack of her beloved Virgin Lights. Mike grumbles until Leslie flashes her breasts, which makes him spring into action. Unfortunately for Mike, cigarettes aren't the only thing at the vending machine. You're damn right I'm referring to a killer robot. From this point on, the movie turns into a fight to the death between a bunch of sexy, immature young adults and a trio of killbots. Some will give all. All will give some. Fortunately for our heroes, this mall sells guns and ammo. Many viewers have expressed skepticism a mall would contain a guns-and-ammo shop or a furniture store, but none of these nitpicky clowns have a problem with the store glimpsed in the background of several shots that ONLY SELLS ALMONDS!!!

The second film from b-movie veteran Jim Wynorski (his credits include Not of This Earth, The Return of Swamp Thing, Dinosaur Island, Ghoulies IV, The Bare Wench Project II: Scared Topless, The Devil Wears Nada, Busty Cops Go Hawaiian, Dinocroc vs. Supergator, and Sexipede!, just to name a few), Chopping Mall benefited from the production guidance of Julie Corman, wife of Roger Corman and excellent low-budget producer in her own right, with legends like the aforementioned Bartel, Woronov, Miller, and Graham doing their thing, small-dose style.

Chopping Mall is not the movie I'd pick if someone asked me to put together twenty of the 1980s horror greats, but it's a lot of fun, with plenty of destruction, carnage, nudity, wisecracks, and cheap-looking lasers, and the mall is always a great horror setting. Sometimes, you just need a good time, and Chopping Mall delivers. 

Maniac (Dwain Esper, 1934)

Husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Dwain Esper and Hildegarde Stadie (Esper directed, Stadie wrote the screenplays) worked in the way-off-Hollywood indie exploitation circuit, often traveling the country with their films and fighting local censorship boards along the way. These movies amped up the sex, drugs, violence, perversity, and nudity while their creators not very convincingly presented them as educational films (the dangers of drug abuse, the definitions of various mental illnesses, life in a nudist camp, etc.), though Stadie reportedly had a gift for charming censors and getting her and Esper out of legal trouble.

Stadie grew up in the world of the snake oil sales grift, and Esper came from a traveling carnival background. Stadie, a Chicagoan, toured the country with her drug-addicted uncle, who sold a cure-all called Tiger Fat. One of her contributions to the rube-grifting sales pitch was posing nude while draped in a python, the snake covering certain delicate areas. Esper, born in the state of Washington, worked as a carnival barker in the Pacific Northwest. Stadie and Esper met when their traveling paths crossed, and the pair married in 1920. Growing weary of his carnival performers' occasional unreliability and tired of paying them, Esper thought making movies would be a much better grift. Once the film was in the can, you had a fixed product you could sell that would not rely on the availability of live human beings with all their inherent problems and financial needs. Stadie agreed, and the pair moved to Los Angeles to grift some city rubes.

While Dwain and Hildegarde had no intention of creating film art and were mostly just trying to make a pile of cash without spending a pile of cash, the movies they made were so weird that I think it's fair to call them accidental outsider artists. Whether they're good artists or not is another story. Maniac is the pair's second surviving feature film, following a couple shorts to figure out the equipment and lost debut The Seventh Commandment. The surviving first film, Narcotic, is a story of drug addiction, loosely based on the experiences of Hildegarde's uncle. I'm stretching the definition of "feature" a bit, because both Narcotic and Maniac get the job done in slightly less than an hour.

Moving on from the world of drug hysteria, Maniac is a horror film about Maxwell (Bill Woods), an aspiring actor and master impressionist who is taken in and given an assistant job by a renowned medical doctor/research scientist/psychologist named Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter) (I love how old B-movies frequently assume the same guy does all three of these jobs -- it's all doctoring, baby). Though the film is called Maniac, it really should be called Maniacs, because Meirschultz and Maxwell are both, uh, maniacs, and so are a handful of the supporting characters. Meirschultz has figured out how to bring bodies back from the dead, and he and Maxwell steal the body of a beautiful young suicide victim from the morgue and take her to the lab, where they reanimate her.

So far, so good, but Meirschultz soon gets insanely pissed at Maxwell because Maxwell is so afraid of cats that he bungles a second body-stealing expedition by completely losing his shit after seeing three of our feline friends. Long story short, Maxwell goes full-on bonkers and ends up impersonating Meirschultz after shooting him. His complete lack of medical knowledge creates havoc (he turns a mildly maniacal patient into a full-on maniac after injecting him with super-adrenaline), and eventually we get major hoopla involving multiple maniacs, bodies bricked into walls, lots of cat business, and several women in varying stages of undress.

None of this overly complicated story is presented with much coherence, skill, or talent, though the occasional exciting image pops up. There are several scenes where the camera focuses on the back of a character's head or the character who is not talking during dialogue scenes, and the overall sound quality is poor. Storylines are introduced and dropped, characters wildly overact or dramatically underact, the editing has a mind of its own. During the two brief scenes that contain topless nudity, the actresses transform into body doubles who don't look like them, in one instance with a completely different hairstyle. The same thing happens in a scene where a cat's head is squeezed until its eyeball pops out. A black cat is grabbed but magically transforms into an orange cat before turning back into a black cat. (An actual one-eyed orange cat was used for this scene with a fake eye prop.) The second half of the film is mostly just women in underwear or loose robes or topless with the horror movie plot weaving in and out.

This, of course, is an "educational" film, so we are treated with silent-movie-style intertitles with textbook definitions of various mental disorders at appropriate points in the action. Maniac should probably be shown in schools. We could all learn a lot from it.

Maniac is not very good, and the filmmakers have a far more interesting life story than anything they slap on screen, but it's pretty damn weird and a fascinating historical example of how people in the early 20th century received their sleaze. Also, if you're a Hüsker Dü fan, the illegal cat farm scene will be of much interest, since Bob Mould's lyrics to the song "How to Skin a Cat" on the New Day Rising album are taken mostly verbatim from its dialogue.

Esper and Stadie's moviemaking grift worked out nicely for them. After making some more sexploitation and drugsploitation films, the couple also started distributing and traveling with other controversial and/or banned films in the 1940s, including Tod Browning's Freaks and several European softcore sex movies. Esper, also a skilled con artist, supplemented his handsome movie income with occasional scams on his friends and family, though he was reportedly so successful at talking his way out of trouble that he convinced them not to press charges. By 1948, the couple were independently wealthy. They sold their movie studio and retired, living into old age. The lesson in this educational post: grifting pays.

 

Cellar Dweller (John Carl Buechler, 1988)

Cellar Dweller doesn't have the greatest reputation among hardcore horror fans, and screenwriter Don Mancini (who sold his screenplay for Child's Play the same year) was so convinced the movie would be bad that he chose to be credited as Kit DuBois, but I think it's a pleasantly entertaining movie with an unusual story and some charm. It's not a neglected classic by any stretch of the definition, but it's hardly a dud.

There are a few reasons for the film's less than stellar rep. Re-Animator and From Beyond star Jeffrey Combs is listed near the top of the credits and was prominently featured in the film's marketing, but he has what amounts to a cameo, appearing in the pre-credits opening scene and a dream sequence in the first third. His character drives the story, but he's not onscreen very long. Cellar Dweller's approach to horror is also relatively mild. Except for a few gore effects, there's never any real sense of darkness, danger, or impending violence. As my wife described it, "this is like a children's movie with boobs." The producers could have easily marketed it as one of those gateway horror movies for kids if they cut the two nude scenes and re-edited two gore scenes.

The other major reason Cellar Dweller gets a Rodney Dangerfield-esque lack of respect is in the film's origins as a poster-turned-movie. Roger Corman disciple, independent producer, and head of the Full Moon and Empire production companies Charles Band had an idea for a monster design and the title "Cellar Dweller." He commissioned a poster and hired Mancini, a UCLA student about to hit franchise gold with his Child's Play screenplay, based on the strength of an earlier Mancini script that never got made. Band's instructions: Write a movie using the monster and title in this poster for an existing set we need to use in Rome for a $1 million budget. The then-inexperienced Mancini says he wrote an overly ambitious screenplay that Buechler had to rewrite to fit the budget, hence the requested credit change of "Kit DuBois."

The poster-turned-movie begins "30 years ago" in the home studio of comic book writer and illustrator Colin Childress as he works on another issue of his horror comic Cellar Dweller. (The comic art in the movie was drawn by Frank Brunner.) He has an ancient, Necronomicon-looking book by his side that he frequently consults as he draws. If you're guessing that this book is cursed, you're hardly a genius, but you are correct. Colin's drawings come to life, and the dang ol' Cellar Dweller shows up, rips a young woman's shirt off, and kills her. Colin freaks out and burns his work, sending his creations back into the void, but accidentally kills himself in the process.

Back in the 1988 present, Colin's home has been refurbished and is now an art colony called the Throckmorton Institute for the Arts. The newest artist-in-residence at the colony is Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino), an aspiring comic book writer/illustrator obsessed with Colin Childress. She wowed the Institute's board of directors, but live-in Institute head Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne De Carlo) is not pleased. Briggs is a snob who thinks comic books are populist drivel, not serious art, and she's determined to make Whitney's life at the institute difficult. Whitney is the only member of the colony with any real talent, however. The other resident artists are bad painter Phillip (Brian Robbins, teenage actor on Head of the Class, Hollywood producer, director of Good Burger, Varsity Blues, and Norbit, and, since 2018, president of Nickelodeon), bad performance artist Lisa (Miranda Wilson), bad wannabe hard-boiled crime novelist Norman (Vince Edwards), and bad video artist Amanda (Pamela Bellwood). Amanda was Whitney's arch-nemesis in art school and is now Mrs. Briggs' accomplice in sabotaging Whitney's aspiring career.

Though the basement room where Colin died is off-limits, Whitney convinces Mrs. Briggs to let her move down there, freeing up her own room, which will allow the Institute to add another artist to the colony. Briggs enlists Amanda to spy on Whitney after she moves into Colin's old space, and a plot is hatched to get Whitney kicked out by framing her as a plagiarist. If this intrigue isn't intriguing enough, Whitney finds the cursed book and begins drawing some very Colin-reminiscent comic book stories, bringing the dang ol' Cellar Dweller back from the void to wreak havoc on a house full of bad artists.

Yeah, the whole thing is goofy as hell, and a little soft besides, but the creature effects are cool, many of the jokes land, the limited setting is used well, Yvonne De Carlo is great, there's a quality decapitation (this is a pro-decapitation website) and the movie manages to touch on several creative issues with a non-heavy hand, including the burden of an active imagination, the gap between ambition and talent, and the tension between popular and highbrow art. Come on, people. Cellar Dweller is a fun movie.

Cellar Dweller was the second feature film directed by special effects wizard John Carl Buechler, following 1986's Troll. His other directing credits include Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. His special effects and makeup career was long and successful and lasted from the late 1970s until his death in 2019. He may be the only guy to work on both Bikini Drive-In and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he did some uncredited work for the prosthetics team). Buechler's effects CV includes Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype, Mausoleum, Re-Animator, Ghoulies, From Beyond, Dolls, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Prison, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Robot Jox, Bride of Re-Animator, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Tammy and the T-Rex, Red Rock West, Necronomicon, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and Hatchet. He still had several projects in the works at the time of his death.