CHOPPING MALL
Whee! Killbots!
Really, there's only one reason I rented this flick - its alternate title is Killbots and it just reminded me ofthat great joke on The Simpsons with Kent Brockman calling the U.S. Army "The Killbot Factory".
This has nothing to do with the Army. Or the Simpsons. It's pretty much your run-of-the-mall (get it, mall?) Jim Wynorski flick. A bunch of teens stay late at the mall, and the haywire security system tries to kill them. This security system basically consists of super-cheesy-looking killer robots; laser-firing blocks of plastic on treads. These seem like extraordinarily easy robots to evade.
This is not a movie setting out to be Dawn Of The Dead, with robots. Perhaps I'd have enjoyed it more if it had shown that much ambition; there are a lot of interesting, smart, and fun things you can do with a setup like this. But Wynorski is not a very sophisticated filmmaker, and all he wants to show us is a lot of screamin' and killin'.
I suppose there's a market for this - and I admit, I enjoyed it on a "Look, I'm drunk!" level but overall...well, I'll say this. If you're disappointed by a movie called Chopping Mall, you probably should have known better than to have rented it.
I will, however, confess to liking the pet store scene. This could have been used to really good effect in a better movie. For that matter, it probably already has.