Chopping Mall

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Have a nice day.

A 1980s Slasher Movie involving malfunctioning killer robots chasing people through a mall..

Eight teenagers get locked inside a mall and think they're in for a night of debauchery. The mall also has a shiny new robot security system. The creator of the system says "nothing could go wrong". Things go less than stellar.

Thanks to a lightning strike on the mall's transformer, the computer running the security robots begins to malfunction, deciding all humans in the mall are intruders and in need of removal with extreme prejudice. This leads to a running Chase Fight throughout the shopping center as the humans try to evade detection and destroy the robots.

A classic Roger Corman B-Movie from The Eighties, which has gained a cult following due to its hokey plot, tongue-in-cheek dialogue and gruesome robot kill scenes. Also known as "Killbots," the film's original working title and what it was syndicated to television as.

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Tropes used in Chopping Mall include:

• All There Is to Know About "The Crying Game": The movie frequently shows up on compilations of "Exploding Head" scenes on YouTube.
• The Cameo: Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov make a brief appearence at the beginning of the film as their characters from Eating Raoul.
  • Dick Miller shows up as Walter Paisley, a character he has played in multiple films.
• Chekhov's Gun: The road flare.
• Crush! Kill! Destroy!: Apparently the security bots' default setting following a computer malfunction.
• Deconstruction: Yeah, the victims are horny teenagers, like in most slasher movies, but they aren't the idiots most victims in such movies are. They figure out what's happening, and they fight back!
• Distracted by the Sexy: A customer oogles a group of girls in bikinis on an escalator, falls over crushing the boxes he was carrying
• Elevator Failure: How Protector 2 meets its end, thanks to the humans rigging it to blow.
• Final Girl: Partly subverted; Alison has to fight the last killbot alone, but it turns out her boyfriend was only stunned.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: The Protectors' main weapon. They fire them from their visors.
• Hollywood Nerd: Ferdy
• Ironic Echo: "Hey! Have a nice day!"
• I Know Mortal Kombat: when asked if he knows how to shoot a gun Ferdy says he's watched Dirty Harry twenty-four times.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Greg gets a fatal case of this while running through the mall blindly, leaving his friends far behind.
• Lock and Load Montage: The guys stocking up with weapons and ammo at the sporting goods store.
• Lowered Monster Difficulty: The killbots quickly and efficiently dispose of most of the cast. But when Protector 1 has Alison at its mercy in a storage room...
• The Mall: The setting for the entire movie. There is not one scene filmed outside.
• Man On Fire
• Molotov Cocktail: The girls try to use these on one robot, with poor results.
• Offscreen Teleportation: On more than one occasion, the killbots manage to sneak up behind humans, even in situations where their presence should have been noticed way in advance.
• Pun-Based Title: The film was originally titled "Killbots" (and was syndicated to television as such), but it had trouble finding an audience with this title. It was given it's current title for its re-release.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Linda, the tough girl mechanic is killed by a random laser blast while Protector 3 is malfunctioning, while Alison, the more chaste and feminine one survives the night.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The film ends with the three security robots destroyed, but the malfunctioning computer that controlled them (and supposedly has control over other parts of the mall as well) is still operating. Although it can't send out any more robots to do its bidding, it can still cause trouble for any humans in the area.
• Your Head Asplode: Girl gets chased by robot. Girl gets decapitated by lasers.