Chopping Mall, or, Roboblart

Chopping Mall has gotten a reputation as a “cult classic,” enough for its scene with Dick Miller to get a slot in the opening of each Dead Meat podcast, so I definitely wasn’t going into it expecting it to be some sort of art film. It’s definitively 1980s B-movie horror. But I hadn’t expected it to be so self-consciously 1980s B-movie horror. It felt as if they’d stopped trying to come up with ideas after they’d hit on the title. And honestly, who can blame them, since it’s such a good title. Nothing that I could come up with for a title for this blog post would be able to compete, but I still wanted to share all the alternates. Or, Sherman Oaks Killeria The movie takes place in an unspecified mall somewhere in Los Angeles — an exterior shot with a street sign suggests it’s Beverly Center, but the credits say it was filmed inside the Sherman Oaks Galleria — that has just installed a new state-of-the-art security system. Huge steel doors automatically seal up all of the entrances and…