Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 Chopping Mall (1986)

 Hello to the glorious Eighties!  In this silly little movie, Chopping Mall, we have: lace body stockings (I completely forgot about those), stacked bangles, Guess jeans, popped collars, Heineken beer, relentless synth music, big hair with lots of hairspray, hightop Reeboks (or knockoffs) and, that hallmark of 1980s horror, lots of red tempera paint "blood."

The "plot" is this: the mall is instituting a new security systems consisting of patrolling robots that are controlled by a central computer system.  "Absolutely nothing can go wrong," says the head of security at the demo.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, say all of us who have ever seen a horror movie.  Sure enough, a freak electrical storm fries the computer system and the "Killbots" become sentient.  They start racking up the kills (nine total, by my count).  Meanwhile, eight "teens" are having an after-hours beer-and-sex party in one of the mall's stores - which the Killbots obviously take issue with.

Chopping Mall is clearly a classic 80s B movie and, despite being set at a mall, is not quite the pointed indictment of capitalism that Day of the Dead was.  This flick is super cheesy, although keep in mind that computers were not omnipresent like they are now, and this was the era where there were several movies with the theme of the dangers of rogue technology (War Games and Terminator come immediately to mind).  The "acting" is terrible but there is one exploding head (the Killbots have "lasers") which is quite excellent.  You could probably just google that clip online and save yourself 75 minutes.