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.